Editing World of Warcraft (section)

===Classic===
The story of World of Warcraft begins four years after Warcraft 3's final campaign ends with the death of Admiral Daelin Proudmoore, after Orgrimmar has been established as the city of the modern horde. Stormwind's king is missing, with a paladin named Bolvar Fordragon and a woman named Katrana Prestor (oldfag Warcraft fans recognize the name immediately) ruling in his stead. The game's plot didn't really build toward a single story, rather most zones were independent with quite a few questlines leading you all over the world ten times over. Each race and faction had a story, which you stumbled into rather than being yanked by an invisible collar to. Many of the biggest in scale however were actually unfinished, ending seemingly in the middle of the plot (this was because several different writing teams worked on the game, and there were inter-department communication issues). 

At the start of the storytelling, the Warcraft team gave two important things to rely on for creating content; the first was to avoid typical fantasy situations that make players feel very unimportant at the start like killing rats in sewers, and the second was a general direction for the storytelling. The Horde is a bunch of outcasts and former (with some present) sinners who must build a civilization from scratch and survive, while the Alliance was a group of strongly united allies who have fallen on hard times working to retake their hard-won territory from usurpers and to rebuild what's been lost. Each starting area sets up this feel along with giving players a strong incentive to continue onwards (other than Trolls and Gnomes who shared plots with Orcs and Dwarfs for the most part respectively) and the trend continued on until they found themselves saving the world and plumbing ancient sites of antiquity. The players are members of their faction's armed forces whose quests are oftentimes taking orders from members of their faction, or allied factions. Each class had quests beyond that which gave players a sense of place in the world; Warlocks straddled the line between control and their own destruction while increasing their power via risks and generally keeping their activities secrets from the populace, Shamans connected themselves to the world and sought deeper understanding of balance, Druids fought against the enemies of nature and attuned their spirits to the wild, Warriors tested themselves against powerful enemies, and even in professions players would undertake long and perilous journeys to learn another recipe to make a robot squirrel or fry an omelet. Players actually had to finish the plotline that lead into most dungeons before they could even enter them as well. The fact that many, many plots left very little explanation as to where to go or what to do required players to actually read any and all flavor text. 

The initial buildup lead the plot in two directions. In the first, the king of Stormwind was kidnapped by the the Defias bandits, and in the meantime his son and the regent were being manipulated by the dragon villain Deathwing's daughter Katrana Prestor/Onyxia who had organized his kidnapping. He later finds his way back in a comic book. The quest to rescue him on Alcaz Island is never finished, leaving players wondering why he just showed up. In the second, a third of the Dwarf race (the original inhabitants of Blackrock Mountain, which has meant Orcs since Warcraft: Orcs and Humans) called the Dark Iron clan had started a three-way civil war over three hundred years ago and when they were losing had summoned the fire servant of the mysterious Old Gods named Ragnaros who incinerated their foes, fucked up their land until it was nothing but volcanoes and lava with animals made of fire, and turned their skin gray, hair black, and eyes red. They then worshiped him as a god. Players invade Blackrock Mountain in it's three wings, then the actual pit itself where Ragnaros regenerates himself for a war on the rest of the world. An unfinished plot point involved gaining favorship with his opposite, Neptulon of the water elementals (you gain the help in killing Ragnaros, but the politics and aftermath are ignored, even when Neptulon shows up later). 

After that, Warcraft added giant corrupted dragons and Demons that randomly wander the world to kill. 

Player VS Player content (other than grinding as fast as possible to the level cap of 60 and violently violating new players doing their very first quests in the game) was added, involving a capture the flag and king of the hill mode each that represented skirmishes breaking out between the Horde and Alliance (who were at an armistice after the end of Warcraft 3) in the home of the Night Elves due to Orcs building a whole fucking civilization needing more wood than their desert and prairie home provided, and a war between the Dwarves of Alterac Valley (devoid of humans since Warcraft 2) and the Frostwolf Orcs with the former having been there first and wanting to rediscover their past via archeology and the latter having settled there during Warcraft 2. 

A further addition to Blackrock Mountain involved Onyxia's brother Nefarian who was in charge of the remaining Warcraft 2 Orcs in the mountain (and has sired incest babies with her due to the low numbers of the black dragons left alive). He was attempting to create a master race of dragons like his father wanted, although his methods included misunderstood blood transfusions, magical metal, and the general Frankensteining of dragon corpses. 

Another battle location was added, Arathi Basin which featured battles between humans and undead from the same region over who had the rights to the farmland. It was accompanied by a new raid and plotline involving the Trolls of the jungles south of Stormwind, which were worshiping what was probably a servant of the Old Gods named Hakkar (this mention of which meant players would come to expect more Old God nonsense in each update, and be correct time and time again). Players were tasked by the most civilized race of Trolls, the Zandalar who come from an island in the ocean, to wipe out the Gurubashi tribe and the smaller tribes they'd absorbed. Hakkar required blood and soul sacrifice, and his followers had taken control of the Loas (gods) of the jungle. 

More Dragons and Demons were added to the game, and soon after the first event began. In Gates of Ahn'Qiraj, players fought back against the unnatural insectoid worshipers of the Old Gods called Silithid who had been invading the rest of the world via their Starcraft Zerg style of spread. Sealed away in ancient times by the Night Elves and their natural allies (plus Dragons), the Gates needed to be opened with a magic hammer which had to be forged through a fucklong questline. After the gates opened, the Horde and Alliance as well as the Druids of the world battled back the insect threat which was represented by players server-wide completing quests of gathering supplies, then handing them over to NPC's. Upon the Gates being opened, the Ruins and Temple of Ahn'Qiraj raids were added. In Ruins, players fight the leadership of the Qiraji armies including their general and spiritual leader. In Temple, players descend to kill the source of the Silithid and finally the very wounded but recovering Old God named C'thun, who consists of eyestalks and tentacles surrounding a giant eyeball that shoots lasers inside a giant black pyramid hundreds of miles below the surface of a giant black pyramid. All of the above was hinted at, very vaguely, in the expansion pack to Warcraft 3 where the undead somehow got a hold of mysterious obsidian Egyptian statues that ate magic (from the insect people's northern spider-cousins). 

After that, Naxxramas was added. Furthering the plot of Warcraft 3 with the Scourge, Naxxramas was the single greatest of the flying magical pyramids/castles the Scourge use as bases. It floated above the remains of Lordaeron's kingdom, not far from the capital city, and unleashed hell on the remaining defenders both living (crazy, sane, and asshole alike) and undead. Players venture inside and kill powerful creatures representing the Scourge forces in a War quarter containing the Death Knights and skeletons, a Spider quarter, a quarter dedicated to the spread of the Blight and general ickyness, and finally a quarter dedicated to the patchwork golems called Abominations. This was followed by a giant ice dragon skeleton boss, and finally the second-in-command of the Scourge, Kel'Thuzad. 

The Dark Portal event ended Classic World of Warcraft and lead into Burning Crusade, as Demons spread throughout the world and invaded a fair number of zones at random. At launch, the Dark Portal became a swirling vortex again and Burning Crusade launched. 

====Classic Relaunch====
For a long time many WoW oldfags have dreamt of the good ol' days of foot slogging and having adventures that actually forced you to pay attention lest you die to a monster five levels below you. A number of independent classic servers free to play and open to the public sprang up, such as Molten Core, Emerald Dream, Nostalrius, Elysium, Light's Hope and others in order to remedy that thirst. Some got the Blizzard banhammer for obvious reasons (not least because several of them starting selling services on their servers for cash) while others continue to persist, holding as true as possible to the original experience. While major gameplay experiences are typically the same in terms of leveling, looting, monster stats, etc. each server tends to enact their own small fixes in terms of balance and bugs that nevertheless deviate from that original Blizzard build. 

At Blizzcon 2017, Classic WoW was finally announced as being a future thing, with a timeframe of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Nukem_Forever "when it's done"]. This was accompanied by an insane amount of [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pO2YC0mYkAE applause, cheering, crying, screams of "OH MY GOD", shit-flinging, and possible Mountain Dew-fueled orgies], though only time will tell how well or how badly this implementation of "vanilla" WoW will play out. Expect lots of RAGE from newbies who were softened by the luxuries of modern-day WoW and can't even with the 1000 gold epic mounts and more. 

A year later, at Blizzcon 2018, the release date was specified as being Summer 2019. As of the moment, Classic is already out, and only requires you to pay the $15 subscription fee, and the game itself is free. True to it's name, it starts when WoW was at it's earliest (albeit, the future technical improvements such as bug and glitch fixes, class balancing....etc, are already implemented), so unlike the current game: its a lot more slow-paced, unforgiving, and grindy: a true MMORPG experience straight out of the early 2000s. Past server-wide events that took place in old WoW will also be implemented down the line.

After release, WoW Classic has been considered a hit and a fan favourite, drawing in legions of resubbed players... for about a couple months. Predictably, the first to fall were the players spoiled rotten by the quality of life approach of modern WoW (AoE looting, not having to wait minutes between fights for your health to regenerate, traversing the world rather quickly etc.) and weren't prepared for the absolute grindfest ahead of them. Next to quit were old fans who realised that now, with full time jobs and/or families to take care of, grinding for hours just to access, let alone finish a dungeon wasn't sustainable if they wanted to keep taking care of these things. Finally, the playerbase - after almost two decades of playing Warcraft and facing more and more difficult challenges, have cleared in days the content that took weeks, if not months to finish in 2004. This split the playerbase in two: one part took it casually and attempted to clear the previously challenging content (seriously, one BfA boss encounter had more mechanics in it than the entirety of Molten Core) at their leisure, and the other went cuckoo about optimising every single aspect of their character builds, complete with farming buffs in the open world and hoarding world buffs, mostly given to characters present when somebody cashes in the head of a raid boss for a reward. The latter part eventually became prevalent, to the point of people making schedules of who is supposed to finish their quests when (and given those quests tended to give decent loot, that made everybody not next in the schedule majorly pissed) and flipped a gasket whenever someone popped one of those and didn't announce it. By the end of the "expansion" and when the Burning Crusade Classic was announced (because of course it was), the gameplay loop of a tryhard raider consisted of logging in for world buffs, heading to the zone in which it was awarded, waiting for it to be given out and then logging off to await either a next buff pop or the weekly raid. Thrilling gameplay. To prevent that, Blizzard later added an item that made world buffs not lose uptime and give their benefits until cancelled. So much for their promises of no changes.

There were some other less than desireable sideeffects that the Classic servers plagued as time went on; bot farmers that are very prevalent in other MMOs and had been nearly extinct in retail Wow due to Blizzard making in-game currency much more accessible over the years became a downright plight that destroyed any notion of a fair and balanced player driven economy with solid sources of money being much harder to come by (Repeatable Quests that gave gold weren't a thing until the Burning Crusade, and even in TBC they were largely limited to PvP and a large hub very late into the expansion, so the only ways to generate gold without interacting with the ingame economy was the finite supply of one-time quests and gruelling grinding). You could, at peak hours, see hundreds of bots running around in automated patterns in front of Dungeon entrances. Said bots created a lot of money that way, which, like the old days, were offered for real world money on dubious sites, a big no-no according to Blizzards TOS. Unlike in the OG days however, crafty players came up with a loot allocation system called GDKP (basically every raid becomes a big auction, where players would bid on items that dropped off bosses, a way to alleviate the awful loot systems of Vanilla Wow) where people who bought gold off these bots could not only easily launder their Dollar-bought ingame-money (the game lacks the technical means to track every transaction that happens between players) but effectively break one of the core tenets of Wow game design, namely that you would never be able to buy specific items with real money. Blizzard has proven repeatedly that they are either unable or unwilling to resolve these issues and even explicitly declared that GDKP was not against their Terms of Service, [[skub|a statement that was expectedly met with furious arguments.]] The bot epidemic has somewhat lessened over the course The Burning Crusade Classic, but Blizzards poor handling of a genuinely problematic situation soured the mood of the Classic community to a great degree.

Despite that, WoW Classic has seen reasonable success, enough to announce a re-release of the Burning Crusade (creatively called Burning Crusade Classic), and a re-release of "Vanilla" Classic, called Seasons of Mastery. What it means is that everybody starts from level 1 on new servers, with some changes implemented to make the experience different in theory. In practice, it was mostly the same. However, in a show of brilliance, [[FAIL|Blizzard forgot to turn realm transfers off for those worlds]], which meant people in full endgame gear absolutely decimating whole battlegrounds alone if they decided to pay and bring their OP mains to them.

Later, Blizzard also announced the release of Wrath of the Lich King Classic. Because of course they did.