No Classic Wrath or TBC Servers? - Blizzard's Big Mistake 

Bro watch out Arthas is right behind you

I love how blizzard has 100 dead servers on live but pretends it's too much of a hassle to run 1 or 2 for each classic expansion

In my opinion, you can't call anything post cata "Classic." I feel like the point of classic is to have the world back to pre-cata maps. I don't even play classic, but I feel like Classic Cata just defeats the point of what people wanted.

I would like a server for each, with the option to level and play classic, then transfer to TBC, play, and then transfer to WOtlk etc

Dont get me wrong I love Cataclysm. It's one of my favorite expansions. But not being able to play Wrath or TBC when I had so much more to do and wanted to do. This actually fucking pisses me off. What in the hell are they doing? This breaks my heart

I just don’t get it. They invested all that time, effort, and money into bringing back something that people have been asking for for years. Just to erase it all again. In favor of something that very few people asked for, and that was was initially treated as a joke. “Classic Cataclysm” is an oxymoron.

The question for a large company like Blizzard isn't whether something would be profitable. It's whether something would be profitable enough to be worth the hassle compared to something else.

I'm surprised that they didn't keep Wrath legacy servers around like they did for Classic. There are people that have been consistently playing Wrath since Cata came out on Pservers. Even if they just consolidated the servers down, there would still be a pretty large base of people willing to pay $15 a month for their Wrath fix.

The early expansions have really unique gameplay styles attached to them. I think it would be really nice to be able to go back and replay these older expansions whenever the desire hits, just like playing an older Pokémon game or something.

Time for Wrath of the Lich King private servers to rise up once again!!! There must always be... *Dramatic Lightning*... A Wrath of the Lich King...

I think reworking the chromie time system of retail to accomodate your classic flavor of choice should be the next route; no multiple clients, just all one umbrella. They've been backporting all the data structures, so it's plausible!

They essentially deleted all my characters since I'm not interested in playing Cata. So now I have a bunch of low level Classic characters instead...

The Cataclysm classic announcement was such a punch to the gut. Learning there would be no permanent TBC/Wrath servers was a curb stomp.

What a total bonehead move by Blizzard. They continually shoot themselves in the foot.

Another argument for this is the ability to unlock content that has since gone away. I hope one day they unlock this. Fomo is so toxic when you're playing with new players. "You can't get this anymore because you weren't there." It should be. "You *can* get this but you need to do this specific challenge or gather this group in this mode to get it."

They've definitely missed a trick with not leaving at least Wrath up, because now you can't explore the old Azeroth in an easier way than vanilla classic.

Dude I just thought about TBC servers getting out of the shower today

They can't use the excuse of, "not having the files for the game" anymore...

Let's talk about ice cream. For a lot of us our favorite flavor is vanilla. Eating vanilla forever does tend to get boring so once in awhile it's nice to add in a couple toppings. Tbc was like adding pecans to our vanilla ice cream. Wrath was like adding a butterscotch swirl but the spirit stayed the same. Cataclysm is like adding nesquik and changing the entire base now to chocolate. From here on out the base is always going to be chocolate no matter how many toppings you add to it. Chocolate is great, but what happens when you have a taste for vanilla once again and you can't go back? The way I see all of wow's expansions is like adding more toppings to an already. Rich ice cream sundae. Some of the toppings evaporated and some of the toppings have forever soured this sundae. What will keep me playing forever is if I had the option to redo the first three bits of content from fresh over and over endlessly. Not looking like that's going to be the case so my journey ends with the end of Wrath classic.

It boggles my mind that they didn't make levels and gear work the way professions now work. Just have a 1-10 level for each expansion and have a separate progression for each expansion for each character. When you move continents your character's level / gear changes. It's so easy. Blizz sitting on their hands.

and this is just one of the many reasons i stopped giving Blizzard money -- they are basically the same as EA now

Is that a pirate ship coming in? Time to set sail!

crendor in front of a shitty green screen ! !

Who could have forseen that a nostalgia cash-grab wouldn't last forever?!!??!!?

My level 60 MC raider Classic Mage has been in purgatory since they forcibly transferred her to TBC classic. Seeing that they were gonna close down the servers for the OG versions after awhile kinda killed any motivation for me to continue playing on them, because I knew they were just gonna get shoved into the next expansion. Blizzard literally picked the WORST system for this

Giving the choice to go to a Cata server or not would have been the best thing. I didn't get to finish my Weapon Masters.

the reason they dont is because when they left vanilla servers around not enough people stayed in era. and they dont want to have more clients for each expansion. i personally woulda loved to have perma toons in vanilla tbc and wotlk and bounced between the 3 expansions

Naw Crendor, if they didn't take away the feature then they wouldn't have anything to promote for when they bring it back in like the late 2020s... It'll be a big event, for the 3rd release of TBC...

100% agree. I’ve been craving TBC recently and have to investigate private servers if I want to play it, despite blizzard having classic established. Either the server model you described with transfers or a simple rolling fresh cycle of vanilla through wrath every few years would probably please most people. Even when era servers grow stale for awhile they often experience revivals over time, like we saw with the self-imposed HC challenge. What’s the point of classic if we still need private servers to catalogue the expansions?

my guess is they are trying to railroad you into retail, they dont care about sod and are trying to get you to go from mop remix to war within. Also classic era had like single digit players when tbc came out so that's why they didn't do tbc, but maybe when they see the demand they'll add it.

I still say the very concept of "Cataclysm Classic" is stupid. A big part of the point of playing "classic" was to experience the world before all the map changes.

It’s a bigger mistake for blizzard not to add public bathrooms to stormwind city so my character can roleplay about pissing on the seat let’s talk about what really matters

Completely and totally agree. TBC was my *jam.* Cataclysm was the point at which I lost almost all interest in the game (also, they killed Cairn!)

I think it makes sense to have all the per expansion classic servers. They've opened the door to it being a thing, now the only ones deliberately closing that door is also them. It's one of those 'we've literally seen you do this already' asks from players.

They should have done this from the start, and also if they reach max lvl give them the option to go the next server/expansion. I don't understand why this was not the plan from the start. This is how I hoped it was going to be so many years ago.

They will probably bring back TBC or Wrath as seasonal servers in the future, either in Classic like Season of Discovery or on Retail like the MoP Remix. The problem with all the different versions of the game we currently have is while the sub count is a decent roughly 8 million, its divided 4 ways between Vanilla Classic, Latest expansion Classic (Cata), Season of Discovery and Retail which does not help the game. Adding dedicated TBC and Wrath servers will only make it worse.

They could do what EverQuest has been doing: they have some "live" servers, and several progression servers that are started off with the base-game, and every few months they put in the content from another expansions. After a while, it goes into endgame and the characters are converted to a live server.

I thought for sure that was the plan with classic servers. Have at least one up for each expac. No more TBC or WotLK again makes me sad =( I imagine players themselves could organize community events on those servers. But guess private servers are it now.

I'm glad you talked about this, even if I'm doubtful they'll change their minds since Classic was first announced, I assumed it would encompass Vanilla, TBC, and Wrath they made the most sense to fit criteria for Legacy servers, as anything Cataclysm and after is pretty much modern retail, the world change irreversibly, the Vanilla world is the entire appeal for me Wrath was my favourite era in the game and even though I also play and enjoy modern WoW, I was looking forward to keeping a side character in Classic that would be a little time capsule, where I could revisit the old world for nostalgia's sake Catalcysm has completely negated any interest I had, and it sucks because I put a lot of work into my Classic character, now it feels like it was a waste as I have no personal motivation to play her again as I have retail Wow already

I would enjoy that, I hated the fact that Wrath overtook TBC. I wanted to level up and find a guild during that time.

I would actually guess that they might do some SOD TBC/Wrath stuff or just relaunch a TBC/Wrath and sell some Herioc packs at a later point.

I agree with you, we need TBC and Wrath era servers. As someone who missed out on tbc and mostly wrath due to irl, I would like to experience those expansions.

Yeah, the move to Cata classic finally killed my urge to play classic, I can do it on live now, for everything.

Thank you!! It makes no sense at all to have so many servers for each version but we cant have just ONE realm for Wrath and BC? I don't have any interest in Cata, I want to play Wrath and Vanilla+. Wrath is peak WoW.

is there much in northrend thats changing in Cata? I didnt think it got touched? besides some things in Dal maybe? but I could be very wrong lol

A board room took stats given to them by someone that said they’d make slightly more money if they forced classic players to be in the most “recent” classic server rather than preserve each expansion. I don’t know for sure, but I’d bet all in that that’s the case.

they don't want to split the playerbase

I don't play WoW myself, but this reminded me of my reason I'm never picking up Destiny 2 again. When it came out, my friends and I had a great time for months. Later, we kinda dropped out. I always thought of going back in but there is no way to play the content I missed and so many things have been removed. I don't mind re-tooling some mechanics or game modes and I don't expect full worlds that aren't that populated anymore, but missing out feels so bad that I'm just never going to bother again. And that sucks, no matter which video game you're playing.

Completely agree. It's such a waste.

Would be great to have TBC & Wrath Era servers - and really like the idea of being able to transfer/copy from one Era server to the next!

It's all about the good 'ol classic ambiance.

I started in Wrath and hated Outland for a LONG time so I didn't very much care for TBC Classic. But when the Wrath Classic servers replaced the TBC servers, I thought they did the TBC fans dirty. My mistake was thinking they wouldn't replace Wrath with Cata. I ended up getting too busy IRL to do a "proper" 1-80 Wrath Classic run and now I've missed out.

I think closing a bunch of low pop servers on retail to create a small handful of varying legacy servers would be awesome

That "shitty " green screen was extra shitty today .

The first EU classic server I logged on was completely dead. Not a single person in Stormwind or Ironforge, or starting zones. So yeah, maybe reduce the amount of servers?

I really disliked the FOMO that kicked in with TBC Classic. The Era servers were a given, everything after that was not. I would love to be able to just come back when I feel like it 😢❤

Everyone expected there to be 1 server for each expansion. Blizzard would rather shoot themselves in the foot though.

I thought the whole point of "Classic" was to bring back Vanilla to people who remember playing it and appreciating it. But it all turned into Retail 15 years ago, going full circle again. Did i miss something or did Blizzard not understand what people want?

Personally I missed Cataclysm and Pandaria when they first were around, so I'm happy to be able to play them. That said, I agree 100% about things being available. I love vanilla classic and would love to play that again. I like what EverQuest is currently doing: they open new legacy servers every year(some with a whacko ruleset to keep things fresh), then move each server through each expansion in turn. Would love to see something like that for WoW. Or make you choose if you want to move on to the next one or not, and maybe eventually end up in live. That'd be a way more interesting way to lvl a character too.

The only reason to not do a server or two for each expansion is that they know each classic release Cata onwards would be dead on arrival, no hype for them, etc. Otherwise it really makes no sense.

One server would be nice, the thing is they have to remove LFG from wrath and that involves working... not just reutilizing code and charging for it

"You know how Cataclysm was a deeply divisive expansion specifically because of how it removed access to older content? Yeah, let's just do that again. I'm sure it'll be good this time."

Big mistake not to open WOTLK servers for the 20 guys still playing WOTLK

Money, money, money, money, money aaaaaaaand money. Profit, business. Next question.

After all the SoD server drama, you'd think they'd learn to leave well enough alone.

literally 1 server on US and 1 on EU for each expansion would be so easy for them to do and use a negligible amount of resources. would they be dead most of the time? yeah, but there would randomly be influxes of players occasionally when a streamer decides to do a fresh play through of an old expansion.

They probably got a big surge of people getting into the latest expansion because of tbc and wrath. Maybe they think having them available all the time is just a little drip-feed of players, but they could keep TBC and WoTLK as an "ace up their sleeve" for when subscription numbers are getting low, then re-release them to try and capture that hyoe train again of players who missed (or missed out on) those expansions.

I wonder if they'll have the servers on a cyclical rotation, especially since Cata will only be a year long. What'll they introduce after that? Classic Original, or something akin to Turtle WoW? TBC Season of Discovery? I'm curious to see what they'll do after Cata. Surely they wouldn't do Mists since they're having Mists Remix.

It's probably a hardware cost thing, each server is its own piece of hardware. Server blades aren't cheap.

I've been saying this since the beginning! It would be great to have the choice to play what you want. Set the servers with a 18 month restart which would add so much to the player experience. They complained about private servers, and this would take all of that from them. Do it BLIZZ!!

I am begging Blizzard for this. I really want to play more TBC and I am hoping at some point they give us perma TBC and WOTLK servers like classic era

Imagine your customer tells you what they want but then you give them something they don’t want. Blizz logic 101 This is ‘you think you do but you don’t’ all over again.

imagine that one poor geezer who got both warglaives and then forcefully transferred to wrath

Agreed. I wanted classic for TBC. Now it's pointless. idgaf about Cata.

I started playing WoW in 2022 and have always wanted to play the expansions in order of release, and there’s just no reliable way to do so without major caveats. Even with Chromie time you level out of the expansion half way through and start one shotting everything.

I don’t get the point of Cata Classic. That is what old Azeroth, i.e. Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor are now in live -retail. Everything Cata forward exists in retail. Vanilla, BC and WOTLK are the expansions that people want classic for.

This is all I want... I'm an alt guy... I want to level each class with each spec, while maintaining my 40 hour a week job... I wanted to experience the class and spec changes as they happened naturally. Now I'm forced to skip 2 expansions and go straight to Cata. That FOMO shouldn't be a thing on classic servers... Thats the point of classic servers. Makes no sense at all why they would get rid of past expansions. 😑

They should keep them open. Certain gear(legendaries mainly) gets removed/becomes unobtainable, so if you spent time fatming it, get close, then are force transfered, i would be pissed.

Maybe I'm giving Blizzard too much credit, but their intention may be to rotate expansions in order to build up hype. When WotLK launched, not a huge amount of people would have been psyched about starting out on a new TBC server. But give it 4 years and then it's been long enough that there is a significant demand for such a thing. Same for retiring WotLK into Cata. Not that I think this is the best way of doing things, I wish all expansions were available simultaneously. But this might be their line of thinking.

i've been saying to my friends for ages now that if blizzard had the people they could do 1 sever/launch for each expansion that they can just maintain and reset every 2 years with recyled content but use it as an oppertunity to make new or add cut content.

At this point I just assume blizzard hates money and don't want to be seen as a smart company making smart decisions.

it’s not classic anymore with Cataclysm, bringing cata back is so fucking pointless, it’s what STOPPED classic from brung what it is, and changed everything.

At some point this is just going to turn into progression servers like everquest has. Just set up progression through to cata and restart every year or so maybe. You can make the xp and drops a bit faster or just slow down the cycle of progression. :)

I don’t understand it either. I think TBC was a pretty bad expansion but I’d love to actually play it. As a Warrior I had a terrible time in TBC I only managed to PuG the first tier because the class stacking meta totally boned me. If we had TBC servers up the sweats would be gone and I’d probably be able to see t5 and t6.

Meh I guess a single server for each expac would be doable, but I don’t know if there are enough regular players for every single expansion. With Hardcore and Season of Discovery it seems the playerbase is even more fractured

I've always said, since they announced classic originally, the best thing is for them to just make servers for each expansion. Blizzard is always going to crack down on private servers. So why not cut out the middle man where people ARE making so many private servers, and just run a few realms for each expansion. Personally I missed vanilla classic's launch because retail wasn't interesting for me, missed TBC but I came in just in time to make my dk and enjoy wrath before it launched, and other than guild drama from a few tiers, wrath has been fun. I didn't originally start the game until cataclysm. Going back and playing wrath was fun for me, just so I had the chance to experience it. Looking forward to cata's relaunch since we're in the prepatch now, but it would still be nice to have the option to go back and play TBC. Yes the vanilla servers are there, but it's mainly HC players, and SoD players. All because instead of giving players what they said they wanted, they gave us what they thought we wanted. It's a "You think you do, but you don't" moment all over again.

Maybe do what EQ does with progression servers. Roll back after so long if they wish. Do whacky things with loot and other things it does.

One perpetual classic server for each expansion would be cool. My only concern would be thinning out the players even more than they already are. Let's say we had them all right now. That's Vanilla, SoD, TBC, WotLK, Cata, Retail, MoP Remix, am I missing any? So 7 different versions of WoW divides the player by that number. Some will play on more than one, but many will not. I still think it's worth at least giving it a go. They already have the tech for each, why not throw up a server and use it?

people didn't think they'd implement Classic Cata, saying it "goes against the reason Classic was made", yet here we are. ._. it seems what Actiblizz wants, will get implemented, fan feedback be damned.

I agree with you. One server pr expansion would probably be enough. At most maybe one pr region pr expansion. I hated that cata came and took WotLK away from me in 2010 and I am hating that it does it again, 14 years later. Last time I logged onto the classic servers was the day before the cata pre-patch, and I will probably not log in again. It's not "classic" anymore for me.

I wanted to make a progression character, play on classic, tbc, wrath and so on, but I asked google and apparently you couldn't transfer character between this servers, so I lost interest

Bro i been thinking this ever since they replaced TBC with Wrath. I kinda missed out on the TBC relaunch, which sucks because that's when i started. Would love to just hop on a TBC server or smthn

It'll cost players $25 to keep their character to the old servers like they did with classic.

I would literally never go offline if they add a TBC server... but nooo its not popular enough

I'm honestly surprised they did this on one hand, but not surprised on the other. They just seemed to no understand _why_ players want to play the Classic versions of WoW. I was seriously considering returning to WoW for Wrath; the only reason I didn't was because I couldn't afford the sub. Now I can't at all. Screw it, I'm more than done with Blizzard.

They’re probably going to make it into a season later. Maybe it’s going to be a TBC SoD or a Wrath SoD after the current Classic season is over.

Cata was the beginning of the end of my interest in WoW so I guess I get to relive that! 😄

I agree! Even if it is one server. I would play it a lot

Its beyond stupid. When classic has more traffic than some of the smallest servers at times, particularly for the expacks that were peak WoW, it makes no sense to prioritize the dead server. They are just cutting off players that are uninterested in current era wow like myself. Id happily resub to just live in BC or Wrath, maybe a toon in MoP since I missed that era live, but cata? Naw.

I think they should have 1 PvP and 1 PvE per region for each one. If they do a bunch it’ll be empty for sure