Well, this dropped later in the day yesterday....
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| This was captured 11/19/2025. |
And yes, there's a paid boost involved because of course there is:
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| This was captured on 11/19/2025. |
The Outland Epic Pack --including the Boost and 30 days game time-- is $80 US, while the Outland Heroic Pack* is $40 US. Back in 2021, the paid boost to L58 was $40 US, and most of the commentary in the Blizz Forums centered on the "value for the money" for the two packs. More than one person thought you had to buy a pack to even play TBC Classic on the Anniversary servers, so they didn't read the post thoroughly. One person did request the "/spit" emote be restored to the game, indicating that they were not happy with these boosts existing at all.
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| Captured on 11/19/2025. |
However, almost nobody mentioned the real issue here: the bots.
I sincerely doubt that the bot brigades will care about throwing $80 at Microsoft to have a legion of L58 boosts for farming Outland. They're just a higher class of locust, I suppose.
Another other notable item that I've seen out and about is that the Hardcore servers will not progress into TBC Classic, as per this YouTube video by WillE:
However, the biggest change aside from the $80 paid boost is that the TBC raids will all be in their post-nerf settings. I presume that's because they want everybody to blitz through TBC Classic in one year, and the difficulty of some of the raids were simply too much to be able to pull that off. Still, Karazhan especially turned into a cakewalk by the end of TBC Classic back in 2022, because we frequently had very few toons (yes, they were alts) more well geared than my Shaman back then, and she was (at best) partially Tier 5 geared.
This doesn't entirely shock me, but I figured they'd wait until the next Phase's raids became available before they nerfed the lower Tiers of raids. Silly me, I suppose.
WillE highlighted some other things, such as Guild Banks being available at launch instead of when they were first released into WoW back in the day, and that the UI changes found in Retail will make their way to the Anniversary servers. There's also that Dual Spec and the Dungeon Finder will appear in Classic Era as well, so butter my butt and call me a biscuit.
At this rate, we'll be seeing the WoW Token on Classic Era sooner than I'd have thought.
*Minus both boost and game time.
I sympathize with the position against the WoW token, but I feel that third-party gold sellers are much worse for the game, and it doesn't seem possible to stamp that out. Personally, I haven't bought any tokens from blizzard, what I have done is exchanged gold for them on the AH and haven't had to pay for my sub since Cataclysm classic came out -- and I'm paid up until fall of 2030.
ReplyDeleteThe easiest way to eliminate gold sellers is to eliminate the need for gold in the first place. In OG Classic, that was a twofold mix of GDKP runs and the nearly insane material requirements for raids from the guilds that pushed hard.
DeleteI've mentioned it before here on the blog, but I had a conversation with a member of what was then the #2 Alliance guild on Myzrael-US back then, and his guild's requirements for AQ40 and Naxx were of the level of needing roughly 1800 gold per week per raider to maintain a proper stocking of materials. All that gold had to come from somewhere, and it came from bots and third party gold sellers.
The GDKP runs on Myz used to require something like 3000 gold or so minimum to join one, so again that gold had to come from somewhere. The banning of GDKP runs in Season of Discovery and then on the Anniversary servers meant that bots had to be more creative at acquiring gold to sell to people who needed the raiding materials. That meant Mage farming, level boosts, and whatnot. My L50-ish toons can't go anywhere in Stormwind, Duskwood, or Stranglethorn Vale without being barraged by constant whispers offering Zul'Gurub boosts. The current going rate is anywhere from 80 to 120 gold for 4 runs. Some of them don't even take no for an answer, as just Wednesday someone tried to invite me to a raid even though I explicitly told them no thanks.
The raiding material requirements will still force people in TBC to pay for gold, but it won't be at nearly the level as it was in original TBC Classic. And to be honest, the post-nerf raids will also eliminate the raid material requirements that we saw in 2021-2022. My prediction is that we'll still see bots swarming areas of Outland, but without GDKP there won't be nearly the need for gold as there once was. I still see people occasionally asking for GDKP back in Gen Chat and Trade Chat, but they tend to be shouted down overall.