The need to consolidate servers after a large drop off of the player base I totally understand.
But to flat out delete everyone’s characters after having to gall to charge $35 to “keep” them is just obscene. I can only assume it was done out of pure spite because it makes absolutely zero sense.
Did no one at Blizzard foresee the possibility that returning players might be just a tad upset to find their characters, worth possibly hundreds of hours of their life, thrown in the virtual trash? It’s unprecedented in MMO history.
I don’t care if they gave everyone a decades notice, dropped leaflets from the sky and ran around the clock advertising letting everyone one know this would happen. The fact of the matter is that the DEFAULT option should NEVER have been forced progression to other expansions. What did they expect to happen?
Funny thing is it doesn’t make much business sense unless they’re completely unaware of the value of their assets or how to best utilize them to extract as much profit as possible lol. It’s so short term thinking I find it hard to believe.
If it was me tbh I would’ve done the same thing, but only with the intention of returning the service at like 50 bucks and just ram it to the people who didn’t buy it when it was really cheap. That would’ve taught them to complain about the 35 dollar price tag.
Very true. It is ridiculous Blizzard made poor decisions. Short term planning, resulting a negative reaction from the player base, who love Vanilla the most.
Maybe Blizzard will work something out…
Lets keep bumping these posts and show true support!
What you wrote is very true and saddly very accurate, whats even worse is how they actually handled notifying people, considering that they didnt.
They didnt actually sent notifications to anyone that their hundreds, of hours of investment was going to be deleted. The only place they actually informed players was on the forums or on their app, and the reality is if you decided to take a break from the game to focus on real life you had literally no way of knowing that your hundreds of hours of investment would be deleted, because they didnt even try to email people…
i still believe in blizzard though and i sincerely hope they will correct their mistakes, they definitely have the character data, they need to bring back the character cloning service immediately and make things right to the players who didnt even have a choice of whether they wanted to keep their hundreds of hours invested character.
That’s what I did, too. Only for 1 of my four level 60s, in case I ever decided to go back and play. I think I’ve done maybe 2 raids in Classic Era since then.
Everything you just said is wrong and misleading. Your characters aren’t deleted, they’re in Northrend. If you wanted to stay in era, at the end of vanilla classic you could do that for free. It stayed that way for an entire year.
Many did not play Classic or Retail after what happened with Blitzchung two plus years ago. I know I took a nice break after getting what I wanted out of Classic that fall. Then return years later to find all my classic characters deleted. Open ticket three Support members saying they will not open transfers or restore my character. Even when I said yes delete the Wotlk one I don’t want to play Wotlk. At least Retail is good right now.
I got brokentooth and the rest of our group broke away from us. They out leveled a few of us “cause they had to raid”. When they kept pushing we left. Or should say didn’t renew. Blitzchung just made it even easier at the time not to.
This issue i believe is kind of a double edge sword/dammed if you do and/or dont scenario:
In theory, i believe that the cloning service should still be available for cloning, however according to the TOS/EULA, blizzard has every right to so as they see fit. Afterall, as consumers we are only leasing wow content. We do not have ownership rights. If the cloud technology that exists today was around back in during vanilla, maybe cloning would be more viable in terms of blizzards current business model, but id like to believe that the limitations are not due to infrastructure or people power, but one never knows…
With todays classic wow economy (this is not most people first rodeo mind you), allowing the cloning service once again could greatly imbalance the playing field. Mind you, gdkps are kind of already contributing to that dynamic, but hey time is currency, basic supply demand, etc… If the powers that be did reinstate the cloning service it would kind of be like an “Instant Joyous Journey”, with no reason to level grind obviously, accept for faction rep, raid set pieces, pvp gear, etc… I would dig that mind you, but im sure others of course could argue against it.
Anyhow, my 2 cents on the matter for now. In summary, i would most likely bite the bullet and pay for cloning if it was an option, but i dont think blizzard is going to offer that up at this time due to the reasons stated above; however the company may revisit the possibility towards the end of phase 4 classic wrath, as i believe the majority of people dont consider wow to really be defined as “classic” beyond the pinnacle of wrath.
I’ll be the first to lift my torch and yell at Blizzard after the way they handled the classic->tbc transition. I could not have thought up a worse way to address the situation than what they did.
Having said that, they didn’t delete any characters. You had a very large window of time in which to decide if you wanted to continue on in TBC, stay locked in Classic, or pay a fee to have both. Now again, this was mind boggling and I believe it murdered any chance the classic servers had to thrive… but they didn’t delete your chars.
I thought they did, but after a quick email search I couldn’t find one that said that they were removing cloning. I do remember it being during TBCC and I remember it being on the launcher, but if one wasn’t playing or paying attention it would have been easy to miss.
