Is That the End of the Tunnel or...

You know you've been out of the loop when you find out a day late that Phase 5 of TBC Classic will drop next week.

My first thought was.... Really? Really?

I think I should have known Blizz would do something like this, but I'm still quite surprised that they're pushing this hard for TBC Classic to be over so quickly. 

The original length between TBC's release and Wrath's release was 22 months. If my belief that Wrath will drop in August is true, that means the Classic version between releases is 15 months, and the vast majority of that time was spent in Phase 1 and Phase 2. 

Losing 7 months because the "meta slaves", as one of my fellow Monday raiders put it, were able to stomp the previous content isn't a good way of managing the Classic environment. And Classic's problems aren't encapsulated by Blizz releasing things too slowly, but rather failing to handle balance issues between the huge population servers and the small population servers.

Myzrael-US is down 50% from the high point of September/October 2021, according to Ironforge's Classic WoW Population website, and while there's potentially a lot of causes to that, I know quite a few raiding guilds left for the larger population servers, shrinking the pool of available raiders*. Several people I know on Myz faded away from raiding and/or playing in general, and those I was able to keep in contact with did not say "gee, we're just spinning our wheels with the same raid on farm" as a reason for leaving. Far and away the largest reason for leaving TBC Classic was burnout from trying to chase the Meta as fast as possible, particularly when there's real life going on. 

It's as if Blizz and the proponents of the Meta are expecting everybody to chase a server World First all the time, and there's real life saying "Hey, remember me? Those bills won't pay themselves, and the family is expecting you to be around for things."

Perhaps that's the biggest mistake that the big players surrounding Classic have made: the expectation that people will be in a pandemic oriented and shut down world indefinitely, which did not happen.

I personally think this rush rush rush mode will blow up in the Classic team's faces, because people will get discouraged and stop raiding if they feel there's no chance of completing Sunwell before Wrath drops. When you throw that lighted match into the tinder of the arguments over the automated LFD tool, I think that the Classic team had better cool their jets and make sure they know what it is they're doing before they bow to the "rush rush rush + I'm bored" crowd. 

***

Well, there's certainly no reason for me to try to catch up now, even if I was able to miraculously get into a current raid and get every single drop in my favor --not damn likely given DKP and random rolls and whatever-- I'd still be behind on gear if Sunwell is available on next Thursday. So I'm just going to focus on doing whatever I want to do, and I guess that sometime in June or early July Karazhan will close up shop as the Meta crowd start prepping for what to do in Wrath.

I do know the Monday raid team isn't ready for Sunwell. They haven't cleared Hyjal and Black Temple, because they've been trying to catch up on gear just to get to the point of clearing both raids, and I have to believe they won't be the only team saying "Yeah, we're gonna take a pass on Sunwell for some weeks, Blizz. Nice try."

*And bodies for things such as Classic instance runs that are actual runs, not boosts.