Thousands of World of Warcraft Classic players descended on a single server last night to gain a fresh leveling experience – and it was absolute chaos.
Last week I reported on over a thousand World of Warcraft players teaming up to create a “fresh” experience in the Classic version of the famous MMO.
In the absence of incoming new servers with the launch of Burning Crusade Classic, those who only now want to play the famous MMO as in 2004 will face realms filled with maximum players and bottles.
In response, players gathered a lot to ‘recharge’ the vanilla experience on one of the least populated servers.
When I reported on it last weekend, The Fresh Crusade was a community project of which the Discord 1300 players were strong. Last night, on March 5, when the server announced what would be the home of this giant event, the Discord had more than 10,000 members.
The original idea was to offer a fresh leveling experience similar to what was offered when World of Warcraft Classic – and indeed the original World of Warcraft that simulates it – was first launched.
But The Fresh Crusade was too popular for its own good. The server in question, Dragonfang [EU], immediately rose from a low population to a medium population. Caszhar, the player who started The Fresh Crusade, told me about Discord that they could not say exactly how many players participated in the launch, but estimated it at 30 percent of Discord’s membership – that would mean 3,000 players on Dragonfang. at the same time. At the launch, there were more than 20 guilds ready to launch, each with hundreds of players as members.
“I think everyone knew what we were for,” Caszhar told me tonight. “The launch was different from the launch of Classic in 2019. Then there was layering, which put players in cases to reduce overflow, but here everyone was in one space. The experience was chaos, but it was incredible, so many people on “one place was phenomenal. Although it took about three to four hours before people dispersed, everyone had a lot of fun. Many people claimed that this launch was bigger, chaotic and more enjoyable than the Classic launch because of its madness.”
The Twitch video below, from World of Warcraft streamer MetaGoblin, shows what it was like in The Valley of Trials, the Orcs and Trolls exit area south of Durotar. Spoil: it was busy!
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Caszhar’s re-roll experience was similar to that of others, it turns out:
‘I started with five people from my guild and we tried to search, but it was difficult to kill even something, so we ran ahead to higher level areas and killed as many crowds as possible.
“It was far from a traditional leveling experience and overwhelming to have so many people around you at all times, yet something unique that I have never experienced in an MMORPG.”
Here are some screenshots of last night’s action in Dragonfang, presented by Caszhar (to explain the images of players standing in line, some quests require you to kill a specific NPC that responds to a timer Dragonfang was so busy launching The Fresh Crusade that some players were patiently waiting their turn to kill these NPCs):
Now, a day after the launch, things have calmed down somewhat.
“… today we continued to play and a lot of people spread out and it was less competitive to level,” Caszhar said. “There are a lot of groups doing their own thing, and it feels like this WoW Classic server has been revamped and filled with the lives of players who are everywhere again.”
One of the reasons for the existence of The Fresh Crusade is to combat the bottling and economic economy plaguing World of Warcraft Classic.
The Fresh Crusade targeted a low-population server in an effort to give players the chance to get the best “fresh” experience despite this bottleneck.
Unfortunately, butter exists even on dead servers, and Dragonfang was no exception. “Even if Blizzard releases fresh territories, it will only take a month before it is likely to reach the same levels of high-population servers,” Caszhar said.
“The people who are part of this project have had their concerns and it is completely valid. The bottling is not so much of a problem for players as together they level the game and promote the positive attitude we tried to make the playoffs but it’s it will always be a big inconvenience and there’s nothing players can do about it except the report bots. ‘
While Caszhar is delighted with how popular The Fresh Crusade has turned out to be, it sounds like organizing the thing and sticking to the bulging disagreement is quite stressful.
After The Fresh Crusade got the news, some people tried to disrupt the project – an attempt that continued after the launch.
These people tried to make ‘pre-level’ by trying to guess the server. The Fresh Crusade would have been played there before and leveled. This upset some in the community who wanted to start on an equal footing.
And then there is the predictable toxic behavior of some that emerged when The Fresh Crusade increased in popularity during the week.
Despite this, Caszhar is cheerful: ‘Now that it’s cooled down a bit and I was able to immerse myself in the world with all the other people and take a step back to manage it all, I’ve had a wonderful time with all the players participating in this. ‘
Caszhar and co. Are now planning to offer server-wide opportunities to keep players interested, as well as another re-roll event to bring more people to the server for the pre-patch of Burning Crusade Classic. Caszhar expects Burning Crusade Classic to bring in even more players than Classic.