Should we expect Wrath Classic to eventually end to give way to Cataclysm in a year, as well?

Community General Discussion
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I’ve been trying to open up this conversation for months now, but frankly, WoW Classic really confuses me. We still have a version of Vanilla, and its Season of Mastery, but for TBC, it’s disappearing completely to make way for Wrath.

As a player, this makes me VERY uneasy about investing time and energy into playing WoW Classic.

Is Vanilla going to stick around? Is Wrath? Will Wrath be “upgraded” to Cataclysm, regardless of what players enjoy? Hell, will they just remove WoW Classic entirely and push everyone back to Retail “because it’s the newest thing”?

These are conversations that need to happen. Questions than need answers.

After YEARS of campaigning for an official means of returning to TBC, they were given basically one year, and now that entire expansion is being completely removed? I assume the same will hold true for Wrath of the Lich King, then?

Or let me ask a pertinent question:

Do you expect us to drop EVERYTHING, stop playing EVERY other game, and SOLELY play Wrath Classic, in order to enjoy it?

Because I would wager for a lot of folks, a big draw of WoW Classic is being able to re-experience that stuff casually. At your own pace.

Instead, there is apparently some invisible timer ticking away, that you better GOGOGOGOGO, RUSH RUSH RUSH to see those expansions again, before they go offline again.

Look… I WANT WoW Classic to succeed. But I feel like perhaps the way Blizzard is measuring success may be flawed. Because I don’t think Classic servers were EVER going to be “where people spend all their time”. It just isn’t; it’s an old game, by its very nature, this is all content players have ALREADY SEEN before. It is quite literally old content.

Like at Super Mario World. That’s a fantastic game, right? But it’s not exactly “in the news”, it’s certainly not trending on Twitter or Twitch. But it’s a game a lot of people like to be able to return to now and that, that a lot of people just want to have in their gaming library for a “trip down memory lane”.

TBC Classic was certainly going to lose popularity when Wrath hit. We all know this. But for players who genuinely missed TBC, who either wanted to experience it more, who considering it THEIR favorite expansion, what happens to all their time and effort?

It is, quite literally, wasted.

And consider this; the original TBC lasted about two years. But WoW also had a much higher population in general, AND WoW Classic is literally competing with Retail for your time. I mean… you can’t spend Tuesday night raiding on retail AND Classic, right?

To me, this is an extremely troubling precedent. It conveys a sense that your time and effort can be upended at any point, even on these Classic servers. Particularly since Vanilla is still up and running, I think it begs the question, why isn’t TBC? Why wouldn’t Wrath be, whenever Cataclysm might come out?

I really hope people enjoy their jaunt back through Wrath. It was probably my favorite expansion back in the day, even if I’m not personally interested in revisiting it quite yet. But I feel like ANY time spent in Classic now is just a complete waste of time, because unless I’m willing to make it the ONLY game I play, then everything is just going to be rendered obsolete and we’ll be pushed right into Cataclysm, before I have an opportunity to enjoy the game at my own casual pace.

At this point, I don’t think there’s any salvaging the situation. TBC has officially gone away, when means even if they ADDED a dedicated Burning Crusade server again, everyone would have to start from scratch all over again.

Just… another incredibly disappointing decision. In a string of disappointing decisions.

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If they have a Cataclysm Classic, it would definitely not replace Wrath. It would simply be separate servers. The reason they did away with BC Classic is because the interest in staying in the old expansion was not high enough to keep supporting servers specifically for it. Wrath is going to be extremely popular.

While I do hope they keep going up to Mop for Classic, including Cataclysm, some have theorized that they will not due to the change in the world. But we shall see.

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all this classic stuff is getting out of hand and down right dumb. 2 years from now we will be in 10.3 dragonflight and at the same time people will be on 10.0 dragonflight classic.

enough with classic. stop splitting up the player base and ruining retail.

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As much as I like TBC, WotLK simply has more pull. I don’t really expect them to do away with it. It would be insanely dumb for them to do so.

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My guess is they are gonna restart the rotation here soon. Maybe a little faster this time.

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Because people weren’t playing it in high numbers. A lot of people were hoping they would release Wrath.

Since TBC wasn’t getting the amount of “action” they would have liked (certainly not like Vanilla did), they likely felt it was better to just overwrite TBC with Wrath, rather then give themselves the headache of the character copy mess they did with TBC.

Doubt it. Even if they move on to Cata, I think they will leave Wrath on its own servers like they did with Vanilla. People loved Wrath and will play it endlessly. If they just wiped over Wrath with Cata, people would just quit and they would likely lose those players forever.

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The people playing Classic would not play retail if they removed it. They would just stop playing WoW or move to a private server. What is ruining retail is the game play, not having Classic.

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I think they decided to migrate TBCC players into wrath because without them, the numbers would be low. A lot of people who had been planning on playing because they had fond memories of the random dungeon finder have changed their minds.

They’re going to need a lot of participation to prove that the addition of the dungeon finder was what turned the game from the hardest of hardcore games they are imagining it started as into one where casuals feel welcome to play, even though they should not exist.

There was way more raid participation in TBC than there has been in Shadowlands.

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i dunno i just dont get it. maybe because i actually played it all since the games release and i would never want to do it all over again.

same bosses, same gear, start fresh, grind mounts i already got, grind reps i already got, grind achievements i already got.

yea seems like a ton of fun.

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This rabbit hole of rehashed expansions… only one I would consider replaying at all is MoP.

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This is something you see in the private space, too.

Lots of demand for vanilla, lots of demand for wrath, not a lot for TBC.

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I would wager most who play Classic do not even play much of Retail. There is no split in the player base when Classic players had already stopped playing retail long ago.

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Different strokes and all that jazz. I thought I would enjoy playing classic for the nostalgia hit but…I didn’t.

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Keep in mind that cata changed the entire game to what cata is in retail. First 3 expansions were totaly different

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The problem in all this is that ALL that any of us can do is speculate. Vanilla was preserved, TBC wasn’t. That means Wrath’s future is uncertain. “Well, I guess if Wrath is popular ENOUGH, they’ll probably preserve it” or “if people actually don’t stick with Wrath, they might just do another forced upgrade to Cataclysm”.

There’s no feeling of stability here.

This is something Blizzard really ought to be communicating with players about. I don’t want to spend time leveling a character for Blizzard to up and decide “actually, WoW Classic seems to be losing popularity, we’re just going to take it offline”. That seems unlikely, but they don’t seem particularly bothered with preserving any of that “Classic” content, so who really knows?

Like I said, it would just be nice if there was a bit of open dialogue.

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That is because Blizzard got a new dev team and also officially began the merger with Activision right around Wraths final patch. Activision killed WoW just like it has every other game it has ever touched. Bungie split from Activision and ended up getting over a quarter billion dollars as a result. Bungies best ever year was the year they split from Activision. Activision bringing in micro transactions actually caused a loss of money as people began to quit playing because of them.

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They over complicated Classic servers by making them into Diablo-like clones with Seasons of Mastery.

I don’t get why each Classic Expansion has to be separate.

Can’t they do away with SoM altogether and just have a Classic-Wrath server? Level 1-70? No character disappearing, no gear resets, no need to race to the top, no re-re-re-re-releasing the same raid bosses with different buffs and moves.

Make it simple, again.

They give us something great–then for some reason utterly destroy and complicate it.

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Maybe they’ll have a season of mastery TBC server for you guys.

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Yeah now that we know TBC is gone, I don’t see why I would make a character in any particular era of classic if they’re just going to be short expansion cycles. I’ll just stick to retail if we can’t stay in whatever expansion we prefer.

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Really, they should have at least a couple of servers for each xpac that there’s a Classic for, even for relatively unpopular expansions. I agree that a lot of Classic’s value is in its ability to function as a much more complete time capsule than retail can ever hope to be, and that value erodes with each xpac they skip.

100%, most of the people playing Classic seriously barely touch retail.

Classic also just scratches a particular type of itch that retail can’t these days… there’s something zenlike about screwing around on a lowbie alt with the slower pace and old systems from time to time. If Classic disappeared it wouldn’t make me play retail more, but rather play WoW as a whole less. Same can be said for the segment of primarily-retail players who will go bop around in Classic during retail content droughts. Blizzard only stands to lose by not keeping both running.

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