My Experience on a US Server

I mentioned as a side note in a post from January that I had somehow managed to create a free trial account for the US servers by accident. Despite the fact that I never even logged into it, my Battle.net launcher annoyingly keeps defaulting to that account whenever I want to play retail, which is a bit of a nuisance.

The other day I had a bit of a discussion in Redbeard's comments about Chromie Time and how it works, and it made me want to test some things out for myself, specifically in regards to the new player experience. Of course, you can't very well simulate being a new player on an account that's been active for over a decade... which was when I suddenly remembered my empty US trial account. At last, a purpose for it!

I don't really have all the answers to my questions yet, so I won't  talk about Chromie Time or related matters in this post, but just the experience of rolling up new characters on a US retail server was interesting enough that I wanted to write about it.

I started by creating a night elf druid called Shintar on Ysera - I can't believe that nobody else tried to grab that name over there in over a decade, but it was certainly convenient for me! As expected, I didn't have a choice of starting zone but was put into Exile's Reach by default. Classes that have their own starting zones and start at a slightly higher level, such as death knight and demon hunter, were greyed out with a note that they required level ten to unlock.

When my druid loaded onto the Alliance ship where the Exile's Reach experience starts off, I was confused to find another druid standing there, already up to level six, and spamming a single spell over and over. I was initially a bit mystified as to what spell they were even casting... after all, there were no enemies there! Only after a few minutes did I realise that it was Moonfire and hitting the ship's target dummies... which are killable and award XP. The character was just tab-targeting and hitting Moonfire so fast and consistently that I can only guess that it must have been a botted. People do the strangest things.

Anyway, aside from that, the whole thing wasn't very remarkable. As I said in my original post about Exile's Reach, it's a zone that's perfectly serviceable but extremely generic. The only thing that stood out to me was that as a druid, the brief class quest you get about halfway through the zone taught me travel form at level six... but I guess due to homogenisation no class is allowed to go faster than another at that level, so using it actually made me go no faster than night elf or cat form. I could see that being somewhat confusing to genuinely new players...

I also noticed that I was automatically put into a channel specific to new players where people called "guides" would answer questions. I vaguely recall hearing about that system before but I'd honestly forgotten it existed and still don't really know anything about it beyond what I saw. People mostly seemed to use the channel to ask (to me) uninteresting questions like "Which class should I play?" or "How do I link an item in chat?".

As soon as I hit level ten, I logged out and went back to the character creator. All classes were unlocked now, and I was able to choose any starting zone, so I rolled up a human paladin and started her off in Elwynn Forest for comparison purposes.

I'd forgotten what a weird number Cataclysm did on Elwynn, as it actually kept a lot of the vanilla quests more or less intact, but what changes Blizzard did make feel very jarring for old-timers, such as Princess being right next to the quest giver who wants her killed and Goldtooth chilling in a camp outside the Fargodeep Mine instead of inside of it. The changes to Northshire also feel pretty rubbish, what with the oh so threatening "invasion" by lots of neutral mobs. I did note though that Blizzard appeared to have removed the basic "use your abilities on the target dummy" quest I remember appearing after Cata - probably because truly new players for whom this sort of guidance would make some sense all get funnelled into Exile's Reach anyway.

Anyway, I ran about hunting kobolds, murlocs and what not, and it was very noticeable how much less streamlined and efficient this was than the Exile's Reach experience. It's kind of funny to me that I found myself in a world where the Cataclysm content is the one that feels outdated, considering I still always think of the Cataclysm revamp of the old world as the "new" content (compared to how things were in Vanilla).

However, what surprised me was how... comforting it all felt. Redbeard made a post yesterday about briefly logging into retail and going to Goldshire, where he was immediately put off by the crazy mounts. The timing on that was funny to me because my feeling about visiting Goldshire in retail was almost the opposite in this instance. Were there crazy mounts? Probably; I didn't really notice. What I did notice was that there were people out in the town square, chatting, showing off and goofing around, which felt heart-warmingly familiar. There was also a random corpse on the ground, something that represents "typical old-school Goldshire" to me like nothing else.

While I was out questing in Elwynn, local defense went off about the Horde attacking the inn and I had flashbacks to my very first night playing WoW back in 2006, where that exact same thing happened as well.

Another fun moment was when I tore through the murloc village north of the Eastvale Logging Camp - in terms of button presses, retail is of course much more engaging than Vanilla/Classic and characters get more powerful early on, so I was tearing through those murlocs like nobody's business, AoEing and healing myself, which is very unlike the old days... but at one point it did almost seem like I had bitten off more than I could chew, so I was very grateful when a hunter and mage decided to add some damage of their own and probably saved my butt.

I logged into my BC Classic server on EU for comparison and rode down to Goldshire there. All I saw was two levellers passing through, one of whom instantly logged out the moment he entered the inn. People in BC Classic don't "hang out" in Goldshire anymore in my experience. You log on to do the content you want to do and then you log off again. Anecdotal for sure, but food for thought nonetheless.