So in that video they actually admitted they went through the trouble of cloning over every single character, and then simply wouldn’t give it to you unless you paid. That’s super scummy behavior, and their excuse for deleting them is weak. Yes it’s a lot of data. Buy more hard drives. And then they end it with “lol technology is hard”, that doesn’t really fly when you’ve been in the MMO business for almost 20 years. Them actually cloning every single character over for almost a year proves it wasn’t an undue burden, they just wanted the money.
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Yes but storing data they already have costs far less than that.
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Company “goes through the trouble” of creating a product and refuses to just give it away. “That’s super scummy behavior.”
Krazinksy and Dottie are obvious trolls and drama starters, just put them on ignore and pray the company hasn’t fired everyone who had a brain.
By definition, because we pay a subscription, nothing they provide us while we are paying a subscription is ‘given away’. They also didn’t really create a new product. Also, this was the first time in WoW history where you actually had a choice in which version of the game you wanted your character in, it was a unique situation and you can’t blame players for assuming blizzard would handle it like other characters/character services; that being following their own assertion that they do not delete characters.
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No characters were deleted
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Then why can’t I play my lvl 60 on era? I know you will say ‘they weren’t deleted, they were transferred to TBC’ but that doesn’t prove anything. The TBC/wrath version of my character exists. The era version of my character was deleted.
Because you chose TBC/Wrath over era.
I will say the one area where I could see an argument is the choice to default people who never actually logged in after TBC prepatch to Wrath instead of Era.
Even that only really makes sense with the benefit of hindsight. They would have had to have known in July of ‘22 that by August of ‘23 that Era would be popping and Wrath would be a ghetto.
And I’m saying no one should have needed to make that choice at all, or if they did then permanently leave it open to them. This was the first time blizzard ever gave you an option on if you wanted to progress a character or not, so rather than treat it as a choice, they should have viewed both the tbc version of the character and the era version as ‘current characters’ for you, with all of their normal rules applied to both.
And your point about hindsight and how popular era is now compared to then drives home the point that deleting the characters and not permanently keeping the service was shortsighted on their part. In an MMO most player decisions of this kind are based on group dynamics/trends, so a company with foresight would do what they needed to keep their options open towards the goal of maximizing player experience/customer satisfaction.
You have this baked-in assumption that storing the clones indefinitely is without cost.
It’s not ‘storing clones indefinitely’ it’s ‘storing everyone’s classic era characters indefinitely’. I know it’s not without cost, I just think it’s something blizzard should have been willing to pay for if they were going to allow clones at all. I look at it the exact same way that blizzard is willing to ‘indefinitely store’ the retail characters, the wrath characters, the current era characters, etc. By your logic why do they keep anyone’s characters at all.
I know that the data is probably long gone, and it’s probably impossible to bring it back.
But I would definitely pay top dollar if it meant getting back hundreds of hours put into progression.
Yes it sucks, I should have done it when it was available. But the truth is that mostly everyone was uncertain about the future/stability of classic back then. Now that it’s popular again, I understand why everyone wants to clone.
I only got the opportunity to clone one character out of 8 level 60’s. Wish I had done more. Would definitely clone more if I could.
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That kinda shows you don’t know what you are talking about.
So how are a business supposed to make money on something that cost them quite a bit of money? Why on earth would they do something they couldn’t make money from?
Which is exactly the same.
Most people would which is great but Blizzard can’t as the data is gone so they can’t bring it back, but if they could they would.
it was very cheap at the end so you could have cloned more.
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They already admitted in the video you yourself linked that the way they did it was cloning every single character and then unlocking it for you when you paid them money. It clearly couldn’t have cost that much if that was the way they chose to do things. Also they would make money doing it, through subscriptions. Providing services people like encourages them to stay subscribed. That’s the entire point of a subscription. I think you are overestimating how much it would cost them to hold onto the data.
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Also, if that’s exactly the same thing to you, then why are they supporting classic era in the first place at all? There is exactly zero difference between keeping a cloned character on an era server, and keeping a character on an era server that was created there originally.
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Wait, what? Why keep two versions of the same character? Your character was not made on Era realms, which started in 2021 and you made them before that, it was made on a Classic Vanilla realm.
Are you being purposefully obtuse? The video you linked showed that they had cloned all of the classic characters over to era. At that point, they were for all intents and purposes the exact same as if that character had been created on the era realm in the first place, simply stuck behind a paywall. At that point, there should’ve been zero reason for them not to hold the 2019 vanilla characters there indefinitely if they are willing to do the same for a character made on the era realm.
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Then why didn’t you?
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Because classic era servers were dead at the time, and server population is the #1 most important thing.
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