Judging by its Twitch viewer numbers and long queue times, WoW Classic has been quite popular since its launch, but many World of Warcraft private server players aren’t entirely pleased with the way that Activision Blizzard is managing the game.
Inspired by the success of World of Warcraft’s private servers, particularly the most popular one, Nostalrius, WoW Classic is the vanilla version of the classic MMORPG. This also means that it is missing a lot of the post-launch content that helped make it popular.
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Many World of Warcraft private server players are finally migrating to WoW Classic, but not everyone is willing to make the move. A recent report by Kotaku revealed that some players can’t afford the $15 monthly subscription. And others that can spare the cash are are categorically against doing so, as the games master of the World of Warcraft private server Kronos says:
“Many in the community (myself included) do not believe we should be charged the same fee for a 15 year old game as for a current game that has literally thousands of additional hours of content in it, and we see it as yet another way of them being able to pad their subscription numbers.”
Still, WoW Classic’s release resulted in some private servers registering a population decline of around 25%. Some players have expressed their suspicion over Activision Blizzard and its practices, fearing that the publisher will somehow introduce some sort of in-game monetization scheme that will ruin WoW Classic.
“A company that parades loot boxes around like they are the greatest thing to hit gaming is not a company I trust to keep a game like WoW Classic free of extra in-game real money transactions,” said YouTuber DodgyKebaab, known for his content covering WoW’s private servers.
Another reason that is preventing some players from caving in to WoW Classic is the subtle differences between Blizzard’s new release and the private servers. DodgyKebaab said that WoW Classic uses a layering technique, which means that each realm has multiple versions running simultaneously. So, the player base is split up even if you are playing in the same realm, leading to friends that aren’t to be seen again because they ended up in a separate “layer.”
