You’re amid an intense quest when you notice you’re running low on health potions! Your hearthstone is on cooldown, so you can’t travel back to town to repair your armor either. In the distance you see an enemy player, and they’re advancing toward you.
If you choose to stand and fight, you’d be honoring the player vs. player traditions of a game created many years ago by Blizzard Entertainment called “World of Warcraft.”
World of Warcraft, also referred to as “WoW” by many of the game’s players, is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game that was released Nov. 23, 2004. VSince then, the game has had seven major expansions – the most recent being Battle for Azeroth, which was added to World of Warcraft Aug. 14, 2018. World of Warcraft is a vast universe, full of many different regions and zones where you can create a character and turn them into a hero. Currently, in World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth, there are two main factions (Alliance and Horde), 21 playable races and 12 different classes to choose from. The game is immersive, intense and enjoyed by millions of devoted fans all around the world.
However, through the years, World of Warcraft has seen an influx of new players, as well as those who unsubscribed from the game due to being dissatisfied with its content.
Many of those former players joined a private server which is an illegal reimplementation of the game. This resulted in Blizzard questioning if they were succeeding in keeping their player base satisfied.
Many of these servers were terminated, one of them being an infamous server named “Nostalrius.” Nostalrius was popular among players of WoW that favored the original version of the game that was released in 2004, also known as “Vanilla WoW” or “Classic WoW.”
At BlizzCon 2017, “World of Warcraft Classic” was announced by J. Allen Brack, the executive producer of WoW.
It released Aug. 26, 2019. In less than 24 hours after the launch, the game peaked on Twitch, a video game streaming site, at one million views.
Kameron Clinton, an English and history major, said, “I’m loving it! The leveling is better than retail where you stock up on BOA’s and breeze through quests, unlike Classic where you need to communicate and form groups to complete harder quests. There is more of a sense of community compared to retail WoW.”
Classic was “the right choice,” according to Aadarsh Bikram Rijal.
“It’s worth getting if you can afford the $15 monthly subscription fee, and it will also give you access to BFA. So, it’s a win-win.,” said Rijal, a computer information systems major.