You can still jump in and start playing
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Im re-leveling a druid for the first time lvl 42. Just rough not having your main for gold and stuff lol
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I agree they should reopen era cloning
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bump for the views lol
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I don’t blame blizzard for wanting a couple bucks, but really sucks to take the option away. My fault for taking a break from playing, but I’ve always been a casual player that always comes back eventually. Guess I’ll just try again with the boost in SoM to level faster and jump to era when it closes
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I knew the cloning wasn’t going to be forever. Even I took a 6 month break, and in that time, they decided to close it down. My level 60 Priest is stuck in the void, and I leveled up her enchanting, too. And, I doubt, I’ll be hitting Uldaman, anytime soon LOL
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Exactly! I play wow the same way. I get really into for a couple months then I take a break. SOM would be the best way to go man. I have a 57 mage on SOM. But me and my buddies are all lvling on classic ERA.
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I feel bad for the OP. I could maybe understand a technical reason to close cloning (I think the amount of data involved was cited once on Twitter by a dev).
But this clearly goes against one of the pillars of Classic WoW, which is the restoration and preservation of Original WoW. Instead of preserving our characters, the default decision was to delete the characters from Classic WoW - and force us to to upgrade and progress to the latest expac.
It kind of makes me ill because I didn’t come back to WoW to play the latest expac for god’s sake.
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I’m all for the cloning service to return but preservation of the Old World and preservation of inactive characters are two different things. I also think they mishandeled the service by not even sending out an email notification prior to its retirement.
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TLDR:
1.) Adding my reply to the chain to garner attention from Blizzard.
2.) Does anyone have a recommendation for a server in WoW Classic that is not dead?
I agree completely with pretty much everything said here. I am adding my voice with the hope that this gets bumped up to garner some attention.
When I first played WoW, I enjoyed it until the end of WotLK when the experience became too toxic with cross-realm servers and lack of respect from people who forgot that this is a game, so I quit for over six years.
I rejoined and started leveling a character shortly after WoW Classic was introduced, and for a brief time I got to relive the adventure and satisfied my nostalgia, but had to take a looooong break from the game for personal reasons.
Now, roughly three years later, I wanted to give it another shot. I logged on a week ago, and discovered that I cannot access my WoW Classic character. I thought that I would suck it up and just level a new character, and I did, only to discover before level 20 that there are not enough people on the server to run an instance, which is one of the best parts of WoW, in my honest opinion.
Bloodsail Buccaneers has maybe 50 people in total, and while every interaction I have had with people here has been great, I just want to be able to run an instance, and there simply are not enough people near my level for critical mass.
So now it looks like my best solution is to transfer to another realm, and I hope that I can transfer both my old (currently unplayable) character, as well as my new one to another WoW Classic server.
If anyone has any advice, I am all ears. Thank you for hearing me out, and I hope that Blizzard re-opens Classic era cloning.
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Bump reenable cloning, costs nothing to keep it open
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Most of the Era realms were connected with others that share their server type and region. RP realms were exempted from these connections. In addition to these realm connections, Blizzard set up two realms to receive free transfers: Mankrik for PvE (NA East) and Whitemane for PvP (NA West). I play on one of the PvP clusters in the East that holds together the realms Benediction, Faerlina, Heartseeker, Incendius, and Netherwind. Its a small community but our guild has levelers doing dungeons in all ranges.
My advice for anyone looking for a place to play is to roll a level 1 on any prospective realm and chat with the locals to get a better idea of the server’s community/culture.
3 Likes
I was in a similar boat, Grasscutter. Here’s what I learned and I hope it helps.
Choose any realm in a popular cluster. A cluster is just a group of reams which are connected in the same time zone/region. You will see the same players across all connected realms in the cluster. Connected realms allow you to interact with other players as if they were on your realm (you can talk to, group up with, join the same guild, send mail, etc.).
Fortunately, connected realms are more true to Classic. They are not the same as Cross-Realms, which were introduced during Cataclysm, I believe, and made other players that were not on your realm literally phase in and out around you (like ghosts). It added to the erosion of the community feel because you’d often never see the people in your party or even around you in cities again. That is not the case on connected Era realms, fortunately.
Anyway, there are basically four popular clusters of connected realms. One PvE and one PvP cluster exists on the West Coast and a corresponding pair on the East Coast. I can’t speak for the West Coast (or the PvP East Coast) but the PvE East Coast cluster of connected realms (Ashkandi, Mankrik, Pagle, Westfall, and Windseeker) usually shows about 15-50+ people in Stormwind and Ironforge (depending on the time and day). I’m on Pagle and I know at least half a dozen or so guilds are actively raiding. There are additional social guilds, if your just looking for casual and/or leveling.
Here’s a list of connected realms:
Horde and Alliance numbers seems pretty even on my cluster.
Whisper some people about their guild and join their Discord. Once you’re in a guild, I think you’ll feel more at home and you’ll have the best opportunity to run dungeons. (There is still some activity in the LFG Channel but guilds are your best bet.)
Just yesterday (even on a SoM realm) I was talking in Guild Chat more than I have in a long while. My guild plans to live on and move back to Era (and/or to Wrath, to give people the option to play both).
I will still play Wrath for a bit just to satisfy my curiosity. But I think it’s going to be like drinking too much Red Bull or eating too many Hot Pockets. And, as we know, kids (and probably most trolls) prefer Red Bull and Hot Pockets. So I plan to keep playing on Era for a long time to come, which is like enjoying a nice home-cooked Pot Roast.
Here’s a decent list of guilds on the PvE East Coast cluster (thanks to Servius):
5 Likes
Thank you so much!
Thank you for the information and advice, Despitebeing, and thank you Metaphysix for the thorough explanation and solid suggestions. Good people like you make the WoW experience worth it. If I were running an instance with you, I would pass on an epic item for you.
I will have to think it over, and I need to do some additional investigating and research, but I am leaning towards taking a free realm transfer to Mankrik, which seems to have a substantial population thanks to the connected realms (and I did not know anything about the connected realms, please forgive my ignorance). I will try to find a decent guild and hope that it has some good people.
Well, I still wish that my old character could be unlocked/cloned. And truly Blizzard, to lock people out of a character that they created? You should have auto-cloned every character and then allowed the individual players to decide whether to keep or delete the old one. What you did could constitute a breach of contract, even with your intergalactic “we reserve the right to terminate your account” clause, but it is not worth my time to litigate over the existence of a video game character.
For the time being I am content with at least finding a server that is not dead. I hope that everyone here gets the adventure that they were hoping to find.
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Bump to keep this thread going
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I have a level 15 warrior who I wish I could clone. I got a months sub to play him and then realized the tragic truth! I hope this changes!
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Thanks for the good words, Grasscutter.
After the SoM transfers are open back to Classic Era, if you get to Mankrik (or any of the connected realms in that east coast PvE cluster) feel free to whisper me or someone in my guild ”Relax”. (Of course, you can join us now on Shadowstrike, as well, where we are currently at, waiting for the transfers.) I joined recently. It seems like a very helpful and nice guild. It was one of the largest (or perhaps the largest) I believe in SoM on Shadowstrike.
This is Metsphysix alt. 
1 Like
After trying and failing to get through the contact form to reach Blizzard Support, I was so grateful to find this thread! Just wanted to include the message I was trying to write to Support (with some changes), in the hopes that it contributes to the voices asking for this to be fixed.
My friend and I were playing WoW Classic a while back, but never quite finished it. With WoW in the headlines recently, we decided to jump back in and finish our Classic playthrough. However, we both discovered that our characters have been forcibly removed from Vanilla Classic and placed onto Wrath servers in our absence.
We didn’t move these characters over to the TBC servers because we wanted to only play Vanilla. But now, we’re unable to play our characters on Vanilla at all, and can only load them up on Wrath - where naturally our talents have all been reset and the game’s received two expansions’ worth of changes.
Neither of us were emailed or informed about this happening, and we’re both pretty disappointed that this happened as it’s not the way we wanted to play the game.
So I wanted to give feedback to Blizzard.
It is extremely unfair not to let players individually know about this change (surely there’s no hardship in an email for a multi-billion dollar company!) and I am very upset by it.
I’ve been playing WoW since 2005, and have often left the game for several months or even years before returning. But this is the first time that something’s ever been altered on my account behind my back. The one thing my friend and I wanted to do after all these years was finish Vanilla; not get to level 60 in Wrath, but finish Vanilla. We were going to mess around with a Death Knight in Wrath, but that’s all we wanted out of Wotlk Classic.
I hope that you’ll reconsider this action, but I’m also just really tired of poor (and poorly communicated) decisions from Blizzard. WoW is supposed to be a comfy, fun place that I can return to whenever I miss Azeroth (especially Classic, which is supposed to preserve the original core game); but now, all of a sudden, because I missed a cut off date that I wasn’t told about, the version of Azeroth I wanted to play in is lost to me (unless I want to re-do all my grinding, of course).
Honestly, this feels like the straw that broke the camel’s back. This action has killed my interest, and consequently my current sub might honestly be the last time I ever subscribe to WoW - and that’s brutally sad for me to say after 17 years.
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It’s baffling that they failed to send out an email.
If you didn’t read the forums, you wouldn’t know. And why would someone, who isn’t playing a game, be expected to read the news about the game - especially to protect the characters that were invested in from being inaccessible and unplayable??
Our time to gear up and play our characters in WoW Classic Era is something we paid for.
They took away something we we paid for over months/years - without bothering to send out a even a simple, common-courtesy email.
Likewise, I’m paying to play WoW Classic. Now, they have taken away TBC Classic. It’s another thing I paid Blizzard for and now I don’t have access to.
I’m really disappointed. I’ve also been playing WoW since 2005. I have bought every expansion since then and almost all of their games.
And this is how they reward their loyal customers - who have bought and paid for their services for almost two decades now - by making our Classic Era characters and the TBC Classic expac unplayable??
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IMO, they never should have had clones, but rather the ability to upgrade from Vanilla → TBC → Wrath Classic whenever you want on whichever character you’d like.
That way, they never force any content or character moves.
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