Editing World of Warcraft (section)

====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.