Warcraft Direct announcement November 13th of a fresh Hardcore realm that is self-found only concomitantly with a new Makgora tournament replete with Twitch/Youtube events, sponsorships and WoW e-sport endorsements.
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But why do you speculate that? What gives you the hunch or is it just wishing.
I can guess why that might be the case. We know that blizzard is doing a warcraft direct on November 13th. So, at least we know something will be said, though it is unclear what that might be.
We also know that a bunch of streamers were going to create the guild “only fangs” again and start the hardcore challenge in October, until someone said something or suggested something, and plans were changed. They decided to wait till after some surprise announcement in November. (at the time no announcement had been set up).
This could mean that the announcement is in some way hc related. Which otherwise is hard to imagine because hc is probably the game mode with the most replayabilitiy outside of fresh.
This, mostly. They’re not just “a bunch of streamers”. Esfand, Chance and Soni are some of the biggest Classic content creators and have email and discord connections with the developers. They absolutely have inside knowledge of the immediate plans. Soda was about to restart OnlyFangs, then got info from the developer discord there was potentially a fresh HC server coming, cancelled the plans to wait for Nov 13th announcement.
Now it’s possible nothing is coming. But why would a developer tell Chance to wait until November to restart OnlyFangs?
Concomittantly, the Chinese warcraft direct just released fresh Era and HC servers. Granted, their situation is a lot different from ours, they’ve been frozen for about 6 months. But still, I think this is proof of concept.
I believe we will get a Hardcore announcement in two weeks. I believe that announcement will either be a sweeping HC server merger or a fresh HC server. If they do a fresh, to justify it (since HC servers are sort of “evergreen” and always fresh due to deaths and restarting) it makes the most sense to me for it to be something unique. A completely self-found HC server would be unique enough to justify a fresh server.
The last hardcore Mak’gora tournament was actually the most streamed WoW event in the 20 year history of the game. Across Twitch and Youtube the tournament garnered millions of views while the AWC tournament and the MDI tournaments both struggle to break 10,000 viewers these days. It would make sense for Blizzard, from a marketing perspective, to stage a new HC Mak’gora tournament (with sponsors) and a chunky prize pool (last time for $50,000 to the winner, Snutz).
This is my thought process.
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I’m not saying your speculation is wrong, but the idea of a fresh HC server at all just feels gross.
Era has been begging for a fresh for years. Tbcc and Lkc literally do not exist anymore. HC is only like a year old at this point in official terms.
If the announcement for direct is focused exclusively on HC, then it’ll just be, to myself and I feel many others, an out of season April fools joke.
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Honestly the only HC related announcement I could see would be potentially a new Mak’gora tournament, potentially where it’s SF only, and only allowing characters created after a certain date. A new server just seems silly at this point when HC barely has a solid healthy population for 2 servers, and where the servers are still new, I mean consolidation makes more sense than adding another server. There would be zero reason to launch a new server for a tournament also. Really the only way I seem them launching a new server would be similar to China, and to launch one in the Oceana region since it doesn’t have one, but I suspect even that is likely more then they want to spend on HC.
Also with Blizzard showing an effort at least in SOD to cleanup and reduce servers, to add what would likely in a few months be a completely deserted server seems against the current pattern.
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So, like, exactly what I said
Yep. It seems no one really wanted Cataclysm or Season of Mastery, and although SoD was an interesting idea and a well executed experience in P1, it has languished since, and now feels somewhat abandoned. Blizzard has a long Classic history of being out of touch with their audience.
I think we really just wanted Vanilla, TBC and Wrath on an 18-month (54 month) cycle. If they could manage a true Classic+ that would be interesting, but I think SoD has more than demonstrated the 3 interns assigned to it aren’t up to the task, plus if you ask 100 people what Classic+ even MEANS you’ll get 99 different answers.
I agree that a fresh HC announcement would feel tone deaf. We’ve now played some iteration of Vanilla five times since 2019. The appetite is really for TBC now. But insider knowledge strongly indicates developers told the streamers not to launch OnlyFangs in October and to wait for the November 13th announcement. Why, if it’s a fresh era or even a TBC server? OnlyFangs is exclusively a hardcore project.
Yes, but you also thought there was a chance for a fresh HC server, I think the only thing HC might get would be the tournament, and that there is zero chance for a fresh server. Either way, we will see on Nov 13.
Yep! I’m hoping for a fresh TBC server that starts with a solid 1-2 months of the TBC prepatch, allows us to get 1-60, get our professions up, get some phase-1 leveling gear etc, and then boom the Dark Portal event.
But I don’t see why Chance would’ve been told to delay OnlyFangs, an exclusively vanilla, HC guild for a fresh TBC server.
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They won’t waste money on a fresh realm, but they will probably announce an event of some sort. The reason a fresh realm is useless is because hc is constantly getting refreshed on its own as people die. The AH and economy still feel relatively fresh, aside from the bots. However bots will be a problem on a new server as wel, so essentially there is no difference in a new server and the current one. I’m not sure what streamer thought they would waste their resources on this but its a moot talking point it will never happen. HC is the ultimate server reset, I just wish they would ban botters a little faster and more frequent.
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I think its going to be Era TBC to WotLK on a looping schedule.
For HC I think it will be a server with more of the community favorite achievements as well as possibly only self found.
What I hope for though is that we have the two HC servers merge, and then bring in TBC HC as an option.
They actually might, because they’re aware that telling people a “Fresh” server for HC is coming out they KNOW they’ll get a huge bounce in sub numbers despite the structure of HC being different.
This is only true in some ways, in other ways however HC servers could be altered to provide a different experience than the current ones. Although recently the HC servers have seen a decent jump in population due to the OnlyFangz folks saying they’ll come back the two servers could use a merge from the viewpoint of anyone on Skull Rock.
This consequently would then open up one of their servers for this new Fresh server and then they will be getting more money for those server per month for those who want the Fresh experience and new faces, and those who cling to their old toons and have a sense of vigor due to a server merge pop spike.
Them announcing a new Fresh server with added code to help identify and remove bots would be a game changer then for you.
This is what people have asked for a long time. I’d love to see it. But I’m not sure. I don’t know why the big streamer HC project would be delayed for November if Blizzard was going to release a Vanilla-TBC-WotLK rotating realm schedule.
Blizzard is going to tripple dip, with the re-re-rerelease of classic bc/wotlk.
because it also may be an option for HC