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The Expansion that Broke Classic WotLK Classic

In this article, I want to talk about Wrath Classic. I just want to share my thoughts on this reimagining of my favourite World of Warcraft expansion and talk about the four main reasons why Wrath Classic didn’t turn out the way we expected.

Why Wrath Classic Fell Short

Now, look, I do want to make a few things absolutely clear. Wrath of the Lich King is awesome: Death Knights, Northrend, the Lich King, tuskar, penguins… Just listening to even a few seconds of its soundtrack sends me right back to my childhood. I absolutely love it, and when we hopped onto that boat to go to Northrend yet again in 2022, I fell in love all over again, and everybody else did too. This expansion was on fire with love and enthusiasm from the players, from the developers. But suddenly, things started to go downhill. All that hype just seemed to vanish. What were the reasons that happened?

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The Dragonflight Dilemma

The first reason for Wrath of the Lich King Classic’s struggle is actually Dragonflight. For those of you who weren’t there, Shadowlands was coming to an end—World of Warcraft’s worst expansion by a long mile—and nobody had faith that Blizzard was actually going to pull off a successful follow-up expansion because of just how bad Shadowlands was.

The Unexpected Success of Dragonflight and Its Impact on Wrath of the Lich King Classic

Even though Blizzard announced that Dragonflight was going to come out a mere 2 months after Wrath of the Lich King Classic would be released, there was really no fear. Blizzard couldn’t pull off a good expansion, good enough to dethrone the one true king, or could they? Dragonflight turned out to be a pretty solid expansion. It wasn’t mind-blowing, it wasn’t bringing back the Golden Age of World of Warcraft, no, none of that. But it was a good expansion, and people were having fun playing it.

Because of that, the Wrath of the Lich King population began to suffer as people moved from Wrath over to Dragonflight, and so, when they went to Dragonflight, really, they didn’t come back to re-experience the rest of Wrath of the Lich King. Not everybody, mind you, but the fact that Dragonflight had done so well with its launch was really the first reason why Wrath of the Lich King began to suffer a little bit.

Exploring the Woods

So right here along the trail, you can see that there is a perfect example of a little elf home, and it’s said that in little places like these, that apparently little forest spirits tend to live. And sometimes, if you look inside, you might be able to see one.

Classic WoW Hardcore

The second reason why Wrath of the Lich King Classic failed is because of something I think a lot of us really loved, and that would be hardcore classic WoW. Classic WoW hardcore was just a fan-made and fan-supported game mode of playing classic World of Warcraft. This movement just blew up, and everyone and their mom, including yours truly—I’m as guilty of it as any—everybody was playing Classic WoW hardcore.

It was just a jump; we went from Wrath of the Lich King to Dragonflight to Classic hardcore. At this point, Wrath of the Lich King had kind of just been left in the dust. Dragonflight had stolen a lot of its population, Classic WoW hardcore had stolen a lot of its population.

In fact, hardcore became so popular in the community that Blizzard released their very own version of classic hardcore, which even further hurt the Wrath of the Lich King population because this is where everybody was playing at.

The Classic WoW Hardcore Wave

The time and of course, everybody wants to follow the crowd, you know, the big gaming title wave. And this is where everybody was; everybody was playing classic hardcore, and it was a ton of fun—leveling up, the tournaments, all of it. But we can’t deny that it was the second reason why Wrath of the Lich King suffered so much. But it wasn’t the biggest reason.

Quitting Reasons

Speaking of this, that’s coyote poop, and a lot of it. Alright, Sterling, I know you’re busy, but I got a question: what’s up, why did you end up quitting Wrath of the Lich King Classic? The WoW token. The WoW token, no why not. So, it’s a little bit, uh, dark out here now, fellas, as you can, uh, see.

I know there’s a lot of people out there that tend to get very frustrated when the subject of the WoW token comes up. There are people out there that genuinely support it, that don’t see anything wrong with it, but the WoW token is admittedly the fourth big reason, probably one of the biggest reasons why so many people left the game.

The WoW Token Controversy and Its Impact on Player Departure from Wrath Classic

Admittedly, the WoW token is actually what made me leave Wrath of the Lich King, and a lot of my friends. The biggest problem was just the fact that Blizzard said that they were not going to put the WoW token into Wrath Classic, but then when the bots and the gold farmers were just running rampant in Classic WoW, it’s just, Blizzard, instead of investing money into creating new technology to fight this bot problem, instead, all they did is they decided they wanted a cut of that pie. That’s how it was perceived by the greater community. Instead of fighting the bots with new software, they would just fight them by taking a cut of their profit by making.

The WoW Token Impact

It became possible to buy gold in Classic WoW for the very first time. The WoW token really was the fourth major reason why so many people left Wrath of the Lich King Classic behind, and it’s why Wrath Classic didn’t do as well as we had hoped. And now, if you don’t mind, there is a fort out here in the woods that I’m going to hang out in for a little bit. It’s just a happy little, relaxing, comfortable fort in the woods.

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