Thousands of World of Warcraft Classic players went down on a single server last night to get a new leveling experience – and it was absolute chaos.
Last week, I reported how more than a thousand World of Warcraft players came together to create a “new” experience in the classic version of the famous MMO.
In the absence of new servers with the launch of Burning Crusade Classic, those who just now enjoy playing the famous MMO in 2004 face the match in realms full of top-level players and botting.
In response, players gathered en masse to “restart” the vanilla experience on one of the less populous servers.
When I reported this last weekend, The Fresh Crusade was a community project whose Discord had 1300 players. Last night, on March 5, when the server that was to be home to this massive relaunch event was announced, Discord had over 10,000 members.
The original idea was to offer a new leveling experience similar to what was on offer when the World of Warcraft Classic – and indeed the original World of Warcraft it simulates – was first launched.
But The Fresh Crusade ended up becoming too popular for its own sake. The server in question, Dragonfang [EU], immediately went from a low population kingdom to a medium population kingdom. Caszhar, the player who started The Fresh Crusade, told me on Discord that they couldn’t tell exactly how many players joined the launch, but estimated it at 30 percent of Discord’s membership – that would mean that 3,000 players descended on Dragonfang all at Same time. At launch, there were more than 20 guilds formed and ready to start, each with hundreds of players as members.
“I think everyone knew what we were missing,” Caszhar told me tonight. “The launch was different from the Classic launch in 2019. Then there were layers, putting players in instances to reduce the overflow, but here everyone was in a space. The experience was chaos, but it was incredible, so many people in one just a phenomenal place and although it took about three to four hours for people to spread out, everyone had a lot of fun. Many people said that this launch was bigger, more chaotic and fun than the classic launch due to its madness. “
The Twitch video below, from the World of Warcraft streamer MetaGoblin, shows what it was like in the Valley of Trials, the Orcs and Trolls starting in the area south of Durotar. Spoilers: I was busy!
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Caszhar’s experience of relaunching was similar to that of others, it seems:
“I started with five people from my guild and we tried to do some missions, but it was difficult to even kill anything, so we ran to higher-level areas and killed as many monsters as possible.
“It was far from a traditional leveling experience and quite overwhelming to have so many people around you all the time, but still something unique that I have never experienced in an MMORPG.”
Here are some images of the action in Dragonfang last night, provided by Caszhar (to explain the images showing players in a row, some missions require you to kill a specific NPC that reappears on a timer. Dragonfang was so busy at launching The Fresh Crusade, which some players waited patiently in line for their turn to kill these NPCs):
Now, however, a day after the launch, things have calmed down a bit.
“… today we play more and many people have spread out and are less competitive to draw,” said Caszhar. “There are tons of groups doing their own thing and it looks like this WoW Classic server has been revitalized and full of life with players who are everywhere again.”
One of the reasons for The Fresh Crusade is to combat bot inflation and the economy that plagues World of Warcraft Classic.
The Fresh Crusade targeted a low-population server in an attempt to provide players with a chance to get the best “fresh” experience they could, despite the botting problem.
Unfortunately, botting exists even on inactive servers, and Dragonfang was no exception. “Even if Blizzard launched new realms, it would take just a month before it probably reached the same levels of high-population servers,” said Caszhar.
“The people participating in this project had their concerns and are perfectly valid. Botting will not be so much of a problem for players as they level up in the game together and promote the positive mindset that we try to instill at the end of the game, but it will always be a big inconvenience and there is nothing that players can do about it other than report robots. “
Although Caszhar is delighted with how popular The Fresh Crusade has become, it seems that organizing the thing and keeping track of the massive Discord has been very stressful.
After The Fresh Crusade made headlines, some people tried to stop the project – an effort that continued after the release.
These people tried to “pre-level” trying to guess the server The Fresh Crusade would be played and leveled there beforehand. This upset some members of the community who wanted to start on an equal footing.
And there is the predictable toxic behavior of some that has emerged as The Fresh Crusade has grown in popularity over the week.
Despite this, Caszhar is in a good mood: “Now that it has cooled down a bit and I have managed to dive into the world with everyone else and take a step back in managing everything, I am having an incredible time experience with all the players who are part of this. . “
Caszhar and company now plan to host server-wide events to keep players interested, as well as another relaunch event to bring more people to the server for the Burning Crusade Classic pre-patch. Caszhar hopes Burning Crusade Classic will bring even more players than Classic.