I honestly found the term “Era” to be super confusing when I first started hearing it recently (I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus from WoW for a while, only recently re-subbed to jump back into Classic). It just seems like a strange term, perhaps even a misnomer given that each expansion is technically its own “Era”.
Now maybe “Vanilla” don’t sound super appealing from a marketing standpoint. Totally get that. But I would almost say “just call it WoW Classic”. People refer to that anyways, and technically the game has had that tabard with the “WoW” logo on it since way back in Vanilla, even if it wasn’t officially used for many years during the Anniversary events (I would love a permanent tabard of it, actually).
Not a big deal or anything, but just feels a strange term to have landed on.
I don’t think the dev team has ever officially used the term Vanilla to refer to Classic. They seem to have rebranded WoW Classic to Classic Era after TBC Classic launched and they became two separate clients:
Classic Era (or just Era, including HC and SoD)
Classic (Classic progression client, currently on Cataclysm Classic)
Blizzard’s nomenclature and the community’s isn’t always the same. I think that PVE and PVP servers are a good example of this, where officially those are Normal and PVP - there is no “PVE” server type, officially.
I’d rather just call it Classic but with there being Classic up to Cata right now that no longer pinpoints what’s being discussed anymore. As for calling it “Vanilla”, well the original Classic did have some differences from Vanilla.
I tend to just call it Era for what it is currently labeled as now (by Blizzard), Classic Era.
For talking about it how it was when released I call it Classic 2019. For a fresh talk, I swap between “Vanilla” (with quotes), Era, Classic 2019 or 1.12 Classic depending.
iirc blizzard themselves termed the forever vanilla realms the classic era realms, where as each expansion has been tbc classic, wrath classic, cata classic.
Sorry to answer your question more directly, this was blue posts talking about the separation of the game modes and the ability to clone/copy characters to ‘‘tbc classic’’ or ‘‘classic era realms’’.
Yeah, I mean look at all the sticked threads that say Era, this is a Blizzard term first.
Anyway, I don’t even suspect this is even an actual question. I’m probably not going to bite on any more of this OPs threads. I think I know who they are.
About the same time Taylor Swift went on tour.
Can’t get away from her.
But anyways, Classic covers a lot of projects.
‘Vanilla’ has always been ridiculous.
Era is plenty acceptable to distinguish from the however many other versions of Classic there are. Especially when having remixes of this song in the background while playing:
Fair enough. I just found it sort of interesting, when I’d heard the term “Era”, my mind has sort of went to “oh, is there another time-limited thing going on I didn’t know about?”
But yeah, the term is totally fine, and I can see where there probably aren’t a lot of alternatives. Even “Original” could be confusing, for people trying to distinguish their experiences with the original game from experiences in Classic.
