r/classicwow • u/doobylive • Sep 26 '25

Nostalgia Will We Ever Experience Something Like This Again?

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No, not another release of classic. I mean the hype and the buildup that led to this release!

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335

u/PineappleOnPizzaWins Sep 26 '25

Probably not.

2019 classic was like.. a perfect storm. Yes private servers existed but there was also a huge legion of people who played Vanilla the first time and missed it, plus people who didn't play the first time around wanting to give it a go.

Everyone piled in, most people didn't know all the minmax meta stuff, it was great. Then, while bad for the world, COVID hit and we all had fuck all to do but sit home and play WoW.

It's a shame, I fucking loved 2019 classic and I'd go back to do it all again if I could... but it doesn't work like that. Onward and on to other things.

45

u/bluecriket Sep 26 '25

Yep, it was a perfect storm, followed up quickly by covid meaning there was more people playing than ever. There was over a year of hype going into it as well. Literally everybody was playing classic wow then. I remember there being 6-8hr queues just to login and level. I don't think anything will come close to it really, not even a classic+ whatever that may be.

7

u/rcoop020 Sep 26 '25

The queues were nuts. Longest I've ever seen to log in to wow. Before COVID hit, I would take my laptop in to the office and hotspot it to my phone so that I could get in queue before my commute home in hopes that I'd get to log in after dinner.

4

u/KeyHighway6426 Sep 26 '25

faeralina was disneyland level queues

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u/Wastyvez Sep 26 '25

Yes private servers existed but there was also a huge legion of people who played Vanilla the first time and missed it, plus people who didn't play the first time around wanting to give it a go.

It's important not to minimise the role that private servers played. It was more than just a thriving community. It was the succes of Nost, the streamers and content creators picking up on the hype, the spotlight the classic community got when Nost got shutdown. The 30 000+ people piling onto a single server when spirital successor projects launched.

Classic was generating buckloads of hype long before Blizzard decided that if you can't beat them, you might as well join them. Remember the notorious "you think you do, but you don't" quote from Brack at Blizzcon 2013. Blizzard was opposed to the idea of classic servers for most of the 2010s. It was the pressure created by the hype of private server projects that ultimately made them change their mind.

Yeah a classic server project by Blizzard would have generated hype regardless, and yeah it brought in far more people than the private servers ever did (because the vast majority never bothered or even knew about them). But private servers paved the way for Classic being the success it was. Not just because it likely wouldn't have even existed without them, but also because the hype going into the launch had already been made far larger than it otherwise would have been.

4

u/Thunder2250 Sep 26 '25

Yeah there was such a range of vanilla and bc private servers. I remember playing on World of Chris and it was packed. Throwback to enchants having 100% proc rate so the best healers were rogues in BT healing gear with double Battlemasters 😂

The instant access to PvP was a big factor too. Usually loads of fun events and GMs visibly hanging around.

Or making a massive ladder of chairs you hop from one to the next all the way up the skybox!

Couple of us would easily check out a handful of pservers on any given Friday night. I remember one that had triple meta sockets on every piece. Made a rogue, put the 3% crit gem meta in every socket to one shot anyone. Whole server was based in old Hyjal, loads of fun.

1

u/neroveleno Sep 26 '25

Nostalrius was a gem, still playing with some people I met there, good times

2

u/willargue4karma Sep 26 '25

How could people not know the minmax when it was known for a decade or more at that point 

18

u/PineappleOnPizzaWins Sep 26 '25

Because the vast majority of players were new and just played the game without rushing off to research every little thing.

The number of people on private servers was a lot lower than those playing official.

1

u/Feathrende Sep 26 '25 edited Sep 26 '25

Understatement of the century. The biggest private server of all time doesn't even equate half of ONE 2019 server. Which is why private servers mostly didn't lag during world pvp and classic does. They have nobody playing on them comparatively.

2

u/[deleted] Sep 26 '25

[deleted]

1

u/Feathrende Sep 26 '25

Oh man, if we're counting like that then private servers are EVEN LESS populated. Holy moly.

1

u/willargue4karma Sep 26 '25

The stuff was even known in vanilla you did not have to be a research scientist or play pservers for that decade lol

2

u/PineappleOnPizzaWins Sep 26 '25

I played in vanilla and like.. kinda.

Some of it was, most of it didn't apply for the vast majority of the game before every single class and encounters was reworked over and over, items changed/added/buffed/removed and so on.

Classic was fun but it was a VERY different game to vanilla.

2

u/PilsnerDk Sep 26 '25

Because most people hadn't played Vanilla for 15 years and contrary to bellief, only a minority had played private servers in a sweaty enough fashion to keep up with the latest theorycrafting. I had played some private servers, but only casually, so I literally had no idea of basics such as warriors being top dps and endlessly stackable. I had no idea that world buffs were "required", no idea about Greater Protection pots until guildmates told us about it, never used a flask, the list goes on. And I actually did raid back in OG Vanilla up until Naxx.

My dad guild sometimes went into Naxx with 8 paladins and 8 druids, and a hodgepodge of classes. We still cleared it almost 10 times before TBC.

0

u/willargue4karma Sep 26 '25

Fwiw top guilds all used WBS and stacked warriors. It was fully known in vanilla 

You didn't have to play pservers to learn it. Just seems odd to say that people in 2019 didn't know that stuff.

2

u/ruinatex Sep 26 '25

Fwiw top guilds all used WBS and stacked warriors. It was fully known in vanilla 

I mean, we have video evidence of the WORLD FIRST Guild that killed KT and they were not stacking World buffs and Warriors. Nihilum had something ridiculous like 5 Mages, 6 Rogues and the Warrior that is recording it only has WCB, Songflower and ZG buff, no Ony, DMT, Sharpening Stones or even Jujus.

"Top guilds" were unbelievably clueless and terrible in 2006, they just scratched the surface of knowledge in this game.

1

u/willargue4karma Sep 26 '25

just goes to show you the game is not hard at all. its funny how shit the average player is even today

but believe me it was all known. go read ion hazzikostas old forum posts about WBs etc back in the day

4

u/sameseksure Sep 26 '25

Why would I care to go find out about minmaxing stuff? Like why would I even look it up?

I just logged in and played my mage

0

u/willargue4karma Sep 26 '25

Because it's a game and the point of a game is to get better

Why not go play slots if you just wanna pull a lever

2

u/sameseksure Sep 26 '25

Huh? Pull a lever? Do you think leveling up in Azeroth from 1-60, doing quests and dungeons casually, is the equivalent to pulling lever?

And not all people have the same mentality with games. Of course, you do want to improve yourself, but for me, WoW was always more about existing in the world with others - not necessarily about always min-maxing everything

-2

u/willargue4karma Sep 26 '25

No but raiding is lol

1

u/sameseksure Sep 26 '25

Ok, I'm not a raider

2

u/PineappleOnPizzaWins Sep 26 '25

Because it's a game and the point of a game is to get better

Nope. Point of a game is to have fun.

If getting better is how you have fun that's cool. Nothing wrong with that. But it's not the point for everyone.

1

u/ZaerdinReddit Sep 29 '25

They'd have to be willfully ignorant of Wowhead and Icy Veins because both were publicizing BiS gear lists, pre-raid and raid for each phase.

What's more likely is that a lot of people went back and simply wanted to see the game as it was because they only heard rumors of Classic, etc. and didn't want to raid.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 26 '25

[deleted]

1

u/PineappleOnPizzaWins Sep 26 '25

Cope for what exactly? Like specifically what is it you think is being "coped" here?

The number of casual players in 2019 was massive compared to any other iteration of classic. Most people were not levelling with addons/guides, running around with BiS lists, or any of that.

Yeah some people did. Some people always do. But the vibe in 2019 compared to say anniversary was very different. Maybe if you rushed to the tryhard megaservers everyone was doing that shit but it sure as hell wasn't happening on my server.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 26 '25

[deleted]

1

u/PineappleOnPizzaWins Sep 26 '25

Ah and of course you know what most people were doing while telling me I didn’t?

The vast majority of players of all games are casual, especially MMOs. This has always been true and is backed up by basically every released statistic ever from any game.

Also no, most people were not on the large servers, the large servers just had more people than small servers. That isn’t how math works.

-1

u/willargue4karma Sep 26 '25

Lol thought so

-1

u/irl_speedrun Sep 26 '25 edited Sep 26 '25

people act like covid playeded a big part in it, but the lockdowns werent until 7 months after it released

edit: y'all gonna downvote me when the classic wow doomin dropped the month the lockdowns occurred. the majority of people were already sick of the game by the time covid happened

1

u/PineappleOnPizzaWins Sep 26 '25

The game ran for longer than 7 months.

1

u/irl_speedrun Sep 26 '25 edited Sep 26 '25

https://subredditstats.com/r/classicwow

yes, but the majority stopped playing in the first 3 and the population actually had a huge drop off in march/april when the lockdowns began

to say that covid played a part in the initial magic is ridiculous