Cloning Service+Classic Era

i agree. forget your dang clones, guys. just join the era leveling community.

well it is

dispells dispelling is intended.

Hey Blizzard, can you just turn on cloning for a month? Just hit the switch and let us buy some chars for a hot minute

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buddy, the clones are gone
the data was wiped
it’s like they did a rm -rf on the character directory, ok

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Pretty sure they deleted all the clones completely. Doubt it’s coming back.

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Two “official” comments from a Blizzard dev who works on Classic Era today:

Clone isn’t technically feasible anymore, unfortunately. Cant much into it past that, so there likely will not be an option to be in both places

and

Hi there, thanks for reaching out. Regretably, the character clone service has been retired permanently and it will not return. despite the assertions of that CS rep, it’s very, very unlikely to return. Sorry if that isn’t what you wanted to hear, and I do appreciate the ping.

I do wish they’d officially Blue post about this, but even then we wouldn’t see people stop asking or challenging why. For now I can just share you quotes from the Era discord where our Blizzard friend has DM’d myself and someone else who asked today in reference to the Reddit post. Thankful for him in any case. That guy is really trying but is just one person who is under Blizzard-Activision’s rule at the end of the day.

Anyways, yeah it’s not gonna happen my friends. :frowning: wish it weren’t the case too. But they’ve made up their minds and the ship has sailed.

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The version GM who countered the other one contradicted himself to start with.

He said it’s gone, but then he said it’s “unlikely” to return. So it is possible, he just doesn’t think it is probable.

Why is there so much confusion about this from Blizzard?

Again, calling out Kaivax for clarification…

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he said it’s “very, very unlikely”
in other words: give it up

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This 100%. Bring clones back.

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Bring back the clones! :slight_smile:

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The main issue with world buffs that some of us have with chronoboon is it destroys pvp gameplay. They could simply make the chronoboon buffs only useable in a main city hub to solve the issue.

Bring cloning services back! A lot of people would love to play their old characters for sure.

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I DO wonder if they brought cloning back if it would actually help in the long run.

I could def see it going either way. You may have less people actually playing in the world if everyone could just bring back their original characters.

Having a fully progressed server is just very tricky in that sense when it comes to player psychology. Many always seek a the carrot in front of them but if they come to full bis, it may actually dissuade some over the long term.

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This service should never be discontinued.

Some players took a break before TBC and are coming back now to find their characters will never be available on the servers they want to play on.

No reason to hurt those players, especially since this should’ve been a free and automatic clone to both branches to begin with.

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I have a lot to say because this doesn’t have a simple answer.

Before Classic Burning Crusade went live many people, and content creators, warned about the dangers of the influence upon the game by allowing character boosts.

“Naaaahhh, it’ll be fine.”

Well those doubters were proven wrong, BOTH TIMES.

It’s not about legitimate players breaking the system, it’s the gross abuse by the gold farmer/seller community that does, because they take it to the extreme, and then THAT corrupts the system. This results in a dramatic shift towards the game economy. Which eventually corrupts the player mindset and mentality.

This is EXACTLY what happened to retail, Classic, Classic TBC, and Classic Wrath.

Era is free of these influences and stil maintains the grind (unlike SoM), which is what makes it unique and the closet thing to original release WoW. The grind creates a ‘shared oppression’ that is essential to why Era is the way it is.

Returning the clone service as is IS the equivalent of a character boost in end result/effect upon the game.

On Era, we’ve had whales that got their gold not by buying it directly, but buy paying people to clone their characters to era, sell their gear, and give that person any BoE’s and gold they had as a result. Since Era gold selling was and continues to be non-existent (because it is not “cost effective” for farmers/sites), this gave those people an incredible economic advantage.

It took us 2 years to essentially ‘redistribute’ a good portion of THAT wealth to others and lower their insane gold advantage - an advantage that still exists and is influential do to people’s desire to use GDKP. Now you can see people with 30-50k running around, and it’s not unheard of. When era started out, most people were lucky to have 3k vs whales with goldcap.

Opening up cloning resets this positive wealth distribution that’s taken place over the last two years and sets it back to almost zero. This is what happens when you inject a massive amount of ‘new wealth’ into an economy.

It also leads to inflation. More money in your economy means everything costs more and things have less value.

Right now, a herbalist can make GOOD MONEY by simple farming and selling herbs on the AH. When Classic Vanilla was in full swing 3 years ago, and gold selling/farming was rampant, you didn’t make squat for money doing this same action. As a result, it was more lucrative to just ‘buy gold’ and buy the items.

I like using my professions to make a profit off of them. I’ve noticed a lot of the Era players like this too. I notice they like using each others and helping one another. I noticed they like this a lot more than ‘just buying it off the AH’- which was the motto of Classic WoW (and why the experience was dogcrap).

-=-=-=-

The reasoning the proponents of the cloning service returning are making that I see so far are “more people would play” and these same people have seem to have genuinely forgotten… Era is not great and has not been great for the last 2 years because it was popular. Instead, it’s because of the opposite.

Our low player base has given us a shared oppression and made us work together like was originally. God dang it’s been refreshing!

As a an Era guild recruiter this whole time, I noticed that 9/10 of the people who came over on their cloned characters… were tourists. Something most legit Era players hate. Hence why the word has a negative connotation.

Tourists that got loot they always wanted, and then promptly quit again after 1 raid. Yeah that helped the cluster/game overall. Not.

I know a lot of people still playing era that were ‘hurt’ by tourists actions just like this and are STILL BITTER about it.

Returning cloning is asking to invest in people who largely do not invest in this version of the game. It’s asking for more people to ‘loot and scoot’ from Era entirely. It IS asking for more as if ‘more is better’ when this has proven to be completely false in our Era environment. I don’t care that I’m repeating myself on this point when ya’ll have forgotten it!

The players over the last 2 years that have stuck with Era by far that didn’t clone over, were largely the ones who started new characters and stuck with it all the way to 60. That grind created character VALUE because of the time spent.

Time is proportional to value.

Boosted characters and cloned characters share this fundamentally since the community is established. It was OK at the start when we were still figuring ourselves out, but that time has passed. Boosting and clones are not equal in how much they share it, but they are very close to being almost identical.

“Ahh I’ll spend $5 bucks to bring back my old character. Meh, yeah still don’t like it. /unsubEra”
vs
“I’ll grind to 60… this is brutal… but I’m gonna do it. Ok I did it. Guess I’ll quit now.”

Which of those two do you REALLY THINK is more likely?

-=-=-=-=-

If you actually read all this so far, one you’re amazing, but two you’re probably thinking I’m against cloning fundamentally… Well you would be wrong. I’m not against it fundamentally, I’m against it realistically. Let me explain.

Controlled cloning could work, but gold and BoE’s shouldn’t transfer. These things unbalance the economy by inserting massive new wealth. Coming over ‘geared but broke’ would get players to become part of the economy and system we’ve made, rather than corrupting it with ‘outside wealth’.

I don’t personally care to benefit from cloned over people paying absurd prices to attend raids I know as a ‘Core Era Player’ I’d have no issues getting into, because it means sacrificing the overall health of the cluster/server I’m on, and the game at large and I have a g’d’mn problem with that.

I’m NOT going to sacrifice this version of the game I’ve helped cultivate back into the best version of the game since release - and subsequently the antithesis of the corrupting influence of Activision upon Blizzard/WoW - upon the altar of greed and personal profit.

I take pride in Era being an ‘old school mmo’ again. Because THANK GOD! The game sucks, but the community makes it worth it. If that becomes corrupted, I have no desire to play here.

Gold farmers, bots, buying/selling gold, and paid character boosting are all bad for the game. If you still don’t know this fact, you’ve been living with your head in the sand for the last 15 years, especially the last 2 with the absurd corruption that happened to C-TBC with it.

Anyone that’s been here on Era the whole time took pride in the fact that we avoided those things. It’s been our SELLING POINT for getting people to play Era. “Free of that retail nonsense” - both the mentality and the site corruptions influences.

If you’re now in support of it, you’ve lost your doggone minds.

-=-=-=-

Like many of you, I too would like more people to play WoW Era as it currently exists, and for that I want MORE PUBLICITY by Blizzard instead.

THAT’S WHAT’S BEEN HURTING IT.

THAT’S WHY WE HAVE LOW NUMBERS, NUMBNUTS! People didn’t even know it was here! Do you even know that there’s a Era Test Realm too?

I’ve spent countless hours talking with people at length about how they found out about it and where they came from. That’s part of what good recruiters do. It’s not just /ginvite (person) or answering a couple basic questions on /4 LookingForGroup when they blip in.

It’s pulling them aside and having an actual conversation. I even talk to people who stopped about why they did. “Too hard to level up” wasn’t a popular answer they gave. Not even remotely.

Era is about the journey, not the result.
DID YA’LL FORGET THIS? Because a lot of you say that same thing in game to new players all the time, and here you seem to be blatantly forgetting it.

-=-=-=-=-
FACT:
Blizzard’s record is atrocious on things like this!
As a result as a learned and observant individual, I do NOT have faith in them to handle a cloning service without serving to the detriment of Era.

If you suddenly do, you’ve obviously forgotten how they handled original release of Era. The release of SoM and Shadowlands and your brain must be literally dripping out of your ears.

That’s the reality of it, and that’s what I mean by being against it realistically. This is also why ‘no changes’ was a mantra about Classic originally.

Practically speaking… it’s a dud.

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yeah, if you have a life or wanted to do anything besides feed blizzard more money you shouldnt have a character you already spent time on. start over budy. this is classic. real hard core gamers over here. we kill RAG bro. with 40 people bro

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Hi, just to seek clarity, are you talking about being able to clone your toons from the current wrath live servers (current classic progression) back to classic era servers? If so, I’m assuming it would need to follow some “fair” rules like if the character you’re trying to clone was created during classic (before TBC) and of course is no higher than level 60 (obvious I know…). Also, a gold cap right so they don’t potentially cause any buyout chaos on some parts of the AH economy since TBC/wrath you can make gold so much easier so people tend to have a lot over time built up once they’re past the early gold dumps like flying and epic mounts.

The reason I asked about my first question, is because if the character just can’t be 60 or higher but could otherwise be cloned over, than people could just level up characters on live wrath since it’s so much faster with the gear/talent changes and heirlooms/exp requirement squash and then just clone over at 60 which wouldn’t add new levelers to classic era realms to help make the world alive and more grouping opportunities.

But once again, if we’re just talking about toons created back in original that people wish they had another chance to clone over and are 60 and lower, I guess I could get on game with that to help increase population with people that want to enjoy classic again (ex: they weren’t able to finish all the raids they wanted, or want to continue where they left off on a level 45 toon and not have to start from level 1 again, etc.)

By the way, I think I read earlier someone say classic era, SoM and wrath realms are all separate and stay that way or something? I just wanted to point out, that SoM characters CAN be transferred to classic era realms, just like they can to wrath realms if you pick that option instead (one way ticket though to never be transferred again to a different game version). It will probably happen again after the next SoM comes and go, that people can transfer them to classic era realms again or current progression if they continued with Cata, MoP, etc.

Why can’t I copy my shaman from 2006 to classic era? WTF BLIZZARD

Because it didn’t play in Classic Vanilla, duh.

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Yes please bring back cloning i want my hunter thanks

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