World of Warcraft Classic
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About
World of Warcraft Classic, also known as WoW Classic, is an edition of World of Warcraft designed to emulate early editions of the game often referred to as "vanilla WoW." The game was officially launched on August 26th, 2019.
History
In April 2016, the World of Warcraft private legacy server Nostalrius received a cease and desist notice from Blizzard Entertainment, forcing the server to shutdown. The decision was widely criticized online, with many condemning Blizzard's actions. In early November 2017, Blizzard announced they would be developing their own classic server option for the game (shown below).
On June 15th, 2019, Blizzard published a blog post with various updates about the development of World of Warcraft Classic.[2] A BlizzCon the following year, Blizzard announced that World of Warcraft Classic would be available in the summer of 2019. On April 25th, 2019, YouTuber MadSeasonShow uploaded a video explaining what was currently known about the upcoming release (shown below).
Launch
On August 26th, 2019, World of Warcraft Classic servers went live.[5] On the day of the launch, the game peaked number one most viewed game on the Twitch streaming platform with over 1.1 million viewers.[6] On YouTube, World of Warcraft official channel released a celebration video for 15-year anniversary of World of Warcraft launch which gained over 830,000 views in one day.
Following the launch, multiple players reported long queue times, with the login queue reaching several thousand players and the waiting time exceeding 16 hours for some servers.[7][8]
Fandom
On Reddit, discussions about the game are held within the /r/classicwow[1] subreddit, which had over 75,000 subscribers as of late April 2019 and over 240,000 subscribers as of August 27th, 2019. The blog CountdownToClassic[3] publishes regular updates and news about the game. Prior to the release, the single-serving site WoWClassicCountdown[4] displayed a countdown set to end with the estimated release date of July 16th, 2019 (later changed to August 26th, 2019).
Search Interest
External References
[1] Reddit β /r/classicwow
[2] World of Warcraft β Dev Watercooler World of Warcraft Classic
[3] CountdownToClassic β Countdown to Classic
[4] WowClassicCountdown β WowClassicCountdown
[5] Twitter β @Warcraft's Tweet
[6] Twitchtracker β World of Warcraft
[7] Reddit β There's a 150,000+ people waiting in the various US queues right now.
[8] Polygon β World of Warcraft Classic players are stuck in hours-long queues
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