WoW Classic Hardcore, the 1.14.4 Update, and the Dragonflight Framework

I have to remind myself that there are currently two WoW Classic clients active.  There are those of us who have found our happy place in Wrath Classic, and then those who seek solace vanilla WoW Classic.

Yesterday at 3pm Pacific time on the vanilla WoW Classic client, the Hardcore rule set for WoW Classic went live at last.  Hardcore rule set servers were made available.  Hardcore is now a thing.

Hardcore for all your… something… needs

Two servers went live on time and were immediately flagged as full.

Hardcore Day One and Full

So the idea is at least popular enough to fill up a couple of servers on launch.  I wonder if they will expand it to more servers come the weekend?

Somebody wants a fresh character duel… because, of course

Meanwhile, those on early were… busy.

People were accepting those duels I guess

I mentioned earlier in the week the influence of Holly Longdale, once the producer for the EverQuest franchise at Daybreak and now a VP and executive producer for the World of Warcraft franchise at Blizzard, was becoming more apparent over time, as this is one of those occasions.

If there was one thing she learned with EverQuest it was how to find and use interest in the community to roll out servers that only needed rules and settings configuration.  Hardcore is just that, and at Blizzard she has the resources to go to town to promote these special servers, so we are getting a bunch of little things like a series of short videos about dumb ways to die in Hardcore.

So the Hardcore rule set servers are now a thing.  I am glad that Blizz is looking into the community for these sorts of things.  We’ll see how popular Hardcore will be.  I’ve been through the specific rules for these servers, but the extended community sites have jumped on board this, so sites like WoW Head have things like specific leveling guides for Hardcore.

Good stuff.  While I am not particularly interested in Hardcore… and I suspect I am going to get more porn referral links from Google if I write “Hardcore” a few more times… I am interested to see how this experiment plays out.

The groundwork for WoW Classic Hardcore was put in place earlier in the week with the WoW Classic 1.14.4 patch.  The notes for that patch show a lot of adjustments to cover odd situations that might come up on a Hardcore server as well as some PvP battleground related updates and some specific fixes for localized WoW Classic issues.

Not in the patch notes, but clearly part of the update, was a change to the underlying framework for WoW Classic, moving it from the Battle for Azeroth / Shadowlands era underpinnings that supported the original launch to the Dragonflight framework that runs the current versions of retail WoW.

We know this happened because the settings and options now match Dragonflight’s UI.

This makes logical sense from a developer standpoint as it reduces the number of code repositories they have to track, make fixes on, and keep patched.

However, the assumption is always that this sort of change will be low impact… and it often isn’t.  I don’t play WoW Classic, having gone down the path to Wrath Classic, but Shintar over at Priest with a Cause brought up some of the issues being attributed to the Hardcore Patchocalypse.

But before that post was published I had been seeing things pop up in various places about the update, ranging from annoyance at the non-vanilla look of the settings to bad things happening in the game as documented by Shintar.

Here’s the thing.  We got that same framework update with the phase 3 patch on Wrath Classic, the Call of the Crusade, and it has been problematic for us as well.  Since that patch there have been times… usually peak weekend hours… when the who game feels like it is about to come apart at the seams.  This is especially true in Wintergrasp, which admittedly pushes the game hard and runs as many instances of the every three hours battleground as it needs to in order to accommodate demand (if you have a quick match, you can sometimes leave the battleground, log in on another character, and queue for another battle), but the errors and issues, down to being told constantly that you’re not in a raid if you join the queue as a group, have been annoying.

I cannot attribute them all to the framework update.  But there are some new issues that showed up with that update.  But that is the way of software.  The update also fixed a number of issues I had noted previously, so Blizz giveth and Blizz taketh away.

So I am interested to hear how things go with our compatriots in vanilla WoW Classic and Hardcore with the new underpinning, whether there will be new and ongoing issues introduced this week for them.

Addendum:

The count 24 hours into Hardcore.

90K deaths already…

That… seems like a lot.  The message on Twitter includes a video heatmap of death, which shows a line across the Wetlands.