Just last Sunday I was posting about the release of the Phase 2 content for WoW Classic. Now Blizz is saying that features from Phase 3 are coming early.
Classic is as classic does
Specifically, Blizz has announced that the battlegrounds Warsong Gulch and Alterac Valley will got live for WoW Classic on the week of December 10th, while the rest of the Phase 3 content (Darkmoon Faire and Blackwing Lair) won’t arrive until 2020.
Why the indecent haste? As SynCaine points out, the combo of ranks and honor and rewards being added and the population faction imbalance on a lot of the PvP realms has made the open world PvP system comically nonviable on many servers.
I’m not as critical of Blizz on this front, though the fact that I play on a PvE server no doubt helps. Blizz has made a commitment to the vanilla experience, and you can hardly toss a stone in a discussion about vanilla WoW without hitting somebody who pines for the halcyon days of yore when there was the constant battle between Tarren Mill and Southshore.
So Blizz has naturally tried to honor that. Remember back at the 10th anniversary how Blizz brought that back for a bit, along with Molten Core, as a special anniversary event? Now they have tried to do that again for the 15th anniversary, only this time it was on WoW Classic and it wasn’t in a staged and balance battleground environment. And guess what, it didn’t work out well.
But I’ll bet you it didn’t work out well back in the day either. A treasured memory of one day of good fights in the Hillsbrad Foothills probably blanks out all the half-assed, lopsided days that were probably more the norm. After all, there was a reason that Blizz created battlegrounds.
On the bright side, at least Blizz had a go to solution handy when reward driven open world PvP ended up being problematic. I don’t know how long the gap was between honor and ranks and rewards and the implementation of battlegrounds was back in vanilla, but I bet it was longer than three weeks. And so it goes.
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