Between August 26th and now, I have played a grand total of 22 seconds of Classic.
On Monday evening, I found a relatively quiet corner in one of the lecture halls at my college, and set up camp. Fortunately for me, laptops are my form factor of choice and moving from my home desk to the F building on campus was a non-issue. Headset plugged in, voice chat booted up, position in Queue acquired….Lets do this!
After a relatively short 70 minutes in queue, I logged in to my previously created rogue on Herod, walked up to the initial Night Elf Starter zone quest, began reading slower than molasses non-instant quest text, and was disconnected.
Boom, the Classic experience is everything I have been waiting for!
“To hell with waiting in queue again”, I said in much harsher words on Discord. A pickup order of wings and a drive home later, my roommate and I booted up Xbox Rocket League, cracked some beers, and settled in for Launch.
Why not jump back in queue and ride it out?
My will to exist is hanging by an ethernet cord. No, seriously.
On Friday of last week my home internet told me to pound sand and has yet to return after three technician visits, multiple phone calls, several customer service chats, and an ordering of a new ISP later.
I have been living out the launch week experience vicariously through my friends and guild-mates. Being unable to play has been unfortunate, being kicked back to pre-1985 has been far worse. However, seeing it unfold from the sidelines has been an interesting experience, nonetheless.
Queues are frustrating, but morale stays surprisingly high!
First and foremost, my scheduled play time being blown away allowed some lower-priority real life tasks to happen: rearranged the bedroom, cleaned the house, weeded the garden, detailed the car, finished Attack on Titan Season 3…all that good stuff I have been putting off time and time again.
The friends that took the time to communicate over our normal wavelengths all spit out the same message over and over: “This is awesome!”
Extended queue times did put a damper on playing together (for those that were able to log in), but the experience in game and the achievements that came with it seemed to balance the mood and keep morale high.
- Greens and crafted gear were set aside for other players waiting to join the game.
- Layering was a success (how dare I say that!) and the realm felt full and with minimal lag.
- Getting abilities through levelling was exciting and something to look forward to.
- Deadmines groups were filled, and quickly at that!
Outside of the length of queues, no complaints have yet registered between any of us in regards to game-created mechanics (non-social). I cannot say I expected it to be viewed as this fun and engaging by friends who are Vanilla Veterans and Wrath Babies alike (and even WoD, dirty, dirty WoD).
Leading up to the game going live, part of me was always anxious that J. Allen’s now infamous “you think you do, but you don’t” was an omen of truth. Fortunately, that seems to not be the case yet!
From the Sidelines
Another summer vacation day passes without being able to play or sync any of my cloud storage files and I can do nothing but watch and listen.
Thanks to the people in my life that are playing however, I feel like this game is going to bring us closer together, and be the game we had all so dearly hoped it would be.