TBC Classic: This is How Blizzard Should Release It

• Author: Furious
• Date: July 11, 2020
• Updated: July 11, 2020
• Expansion: TBC Classic

WoW Classic has now been out for almost a year, and as we get closer and closer to the end of that content more and more people are thinking about a Classic release of The Burning Crusade.

While TBC Classic news has been somewhat limited, there has been some things to note directly from Blizzard that makes me confident it’s a question of when, not if, TBC Classic will be released.

TBC Classic News To Date

First in August of last year World of Warcraft Executive Producer John Hight participated in an AMA on the ClassicWoW subreddit:

We’ve done most of the hard work by bringing back 1.12 so progressing to Burning Crusade would be a lot easier for us. Our plan is to identify everything we need to do should we ever decide to go this route. We want to be sensitive to the desires of our players. Some may want BC and some may not. We’ll be following the Classic community closely to help determine what our next steps should be.

Then at Blizzcon last year during the Q&A panel a player asked about possibility of either Burning Crusade or Wrath of the Lich King servers and once again John Hight answered:

We want to be super thoughtful on the way that we progress, we know that some people probably didn’t sign up to go on to Burning Crusade or maybe not on to Lich King. So we want to handle that in the right way, but we can do this. We’re not opposed to doing it, we just want to do the right thing.

And last, just a few months ago in March of this year, Blizzard sent out a TBC survey to WoW Classic players to get feedback around how TBC Classic should be released with these options:

• Continue playing my current Classic character on my existing server as it progresses to the Burning Crusade expansion, with the option to transfer to a Classic server that will never progress past 60.
• Continue playing my current Classic character on my existing server that will never progress past 60, which the option to transfer to a Burning Crusade server.
• Start a brand new character from Level 58 on a new Burning Crusade server.
• Start a brand new character from Level 1 on a new Burning Crusade server.
• None of the above

How TBC Classic Should Be Released

All of the options presented by Blizzard above are polarizing, we did our own poll at Barrens Chat for TBC to get an idea of what people would choose based upon the options Blizzard provided. We had more than 500 people vote with the most popular option having only 41% of the total.

Now the World of Warcraft community, including Classic, can be very passionate and vocal (among other things) and I don’t think Blizzard should implement an option that will immediately ostracize 59% of the playerbase.

What Blizzard needs to do is provide more than a single option.

Let’s say that Blizzard plans to launch with around 25 TBC realms, currently there are 41 WoW Classic Americas & Oceania realms with varying stages of population on them. Broken up by type it translates into 10 PvE realms, 28 PvP realms, 2 PvP RP realms, and 1 RP Realm.

Here’s an example of how they could break things out for the TBC launch:

There were a lot of awesome community events when WoW Classic launched, such as the race to world first that would be amazing to see in a TBC Classic release. This would give an outlet for that while still allowing players who don’t want to start over from level 1 a way to play.

A lot of players, like myself, also want the option to keep their characters in WoW Classic exactly as they are so they can still play them at 60 and raid, PvP, etc but still be able to play TBC on those characters.

Migration Characters Realms should be mapped from existing WoW Classic realms so that guilds can move together if they do not plan on keeping their WoW Classic characters.

Additionally, if they’re smart they would allow the copy/migrate realms an optional paid service that included a faction/race change (for the people who want to change their character as a Blood Elf or Dranai for example).