It’s all Classic, all the time! News, add-ons, lore, and emails, all this and more on this week’s For Azeroth!

First Days of Classic

So many events as classic launched this week. Classic seems to be an unprecedented spectacle.

Classic Interviews

Two publications, GameIndustry.biz and Forbes had interviews with Ion Hazzikostas about the efforts bringing Classic to life, the early state of the game; and the possibilities that lie in the future.

  • Not opening more and more servers because of long term health of the server population
  • Persistence of Layering
  • Queue Cap of 30,000 but also saying seeing a queue # of 12k or 19k means you are not playing on that server tonight
  • Talked about servers having a capacity for about 3k concurrent players and then said a layer today is about the same as a healthy server population back in Vanilla.
  • Closed communities removing a level of anonymity and forcing players to be more social.
  • Talked about the difference the community will make in the progression rate.
  • gamesindustry.biz interview
  • forbes.com interview

Classic LFG Add-on

There has been a lot of conversation about the Classic experience and development of powerful add-ons that did not exist back in the days of Vanilla. This week blizzard weighed in:

  • Blizzard CM, Bornakk posted in the forum that after careful examination, they believe the nature of Classic LFG is incompatible with the social design for Classic.
  • As such they will be restricting the Classic API to impact Classic LFG and other add-ons like it.
  • Ion Hazzikostas spoke specifically about add-ons “reproducing some of the functionality that we’ve deliberately removed from Classic that we feel could be harmful to the authentic experience and we know that once it’s out there, saying just don’t use it if you don’t want it isn’t good enough, because it will start to become part of the fabric.”

Community Resources/Add-ons

Quality of Life for Week 1 Classic

The most difficult of all obstacles that players must overcome in Classic is the limited and archaic UI. Here are some small add-ons that you never realized you wanted at the start of your journey.

      • Small add-on that adds the vendor price to all the items you will be picking up
  • Questie
    • Provides more robust quest tracking, additional details, and map icons
  • Interact with target
    • Key Bindings->Targeting->Interact with Target (no keybind by default)
  • Turn up your graphics setting
    • Game defaults to 3 by default regardless of what your system can handle.