Carbot Animations, which has made a business out of doing cute parodies of various Blizzard games, including having plush versions of their characters in the Blizzard Store and that re-skin of StarCraft from earlier this year, has returned to the WoWCraft series, which launched back in 2014, to celebrate the launch of WoW Classic.
I suppose we shall see if the foibles of classic become fodder for the series.
As previously announced, Blizzard launched some more servers and allowed free character transfers in an attempt to alleviate the queuing issues that were still plaguing some servers. That brings the total server count up to 77, 39 in the EU and 38 in the US and Oceania.
Blizzard had previously also doubled the amount of characters allowed on a given server, letting their layering tech soak up the extra load. However, this was not only against their plan to get every server down to a single layer as time went on (see the Reddit AMA), but has led to concerns that people are exploiting layering in order to harvest resources from the same node in different layers. Tales of harvest riches have been making their way around the net, with Icy Veins tweeting a screen shot of a player alleged to have 3,000 arcane crystals, declaring that layering was destroying WoW Classic.
Arcane Crystal Panic! At least they said “alleged”
They have since deleted that tweet and calmed down a bit, though you can still find the screen shot in their forums as part of a thread discussing this issue. (Discord nicely had a version of the tweet for me.)
They have drawn back a bit because Blizzard says the screen shot, and others like it, are fakes. In a forum post Blizzard says they are monitoring the issue and have some options should this turn out to be a serious problem. No realm has layers into double digits and Blizz says that most realms have layers in the low single digits, but they may still put a delay into moving between layers. To address any lingering aspect of this Blizz has a patch that will increase the amount of time you need between layer swaps, which increases the more you do it.
Over at Polygon there is a piece up about WoW Classic which concludes that no matter how popular this nostalgia ride remains, the focus it has brought back on to WoW as a whole has been a pretty big deal. Certainly a lot of people were at least watching WoW Classic being streamed.
For those wishing to run dungeons, Belghast has a post up about the realities of dungeon groups that is worth a read.
And, having opened with a video I will close with one as well about the lurking menace that is WoW Classic.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 