Driven by curiosity, I went to the early sales event for World of Warcraft: Cataclysm in Kyiv. Beyond just picking up my game boxes—I had ordered both Cataclysm and a collector’s edition of The Burning Crusade—I had also arranged to meet up with some readers from my blog.
Previous: WoW Player Diary. Part 16. Netherwing drakes and Elementals invasion
Getting the games and meeting the guys was a given, but I was also curious to see what the organizers had planned for the event. I especially wanted to check out the Arena, a gaming center located in the same building as the store, Area 51. Here’s a quick rundown of how it all went down before the sales officially kicked off at 10:00 PM.
The Arena made a great impression. From what I knew, it was the largest computer club in the city at the time—fifteen hundred square meters is no joke. The space was designed not just for players but for spectators, too. It featured a stage with large screens facing the hall, with an area that resembled orchestra seating—soft chairs and tables for the audience. This was an unexpected experience for me. The last time I’d been to a gaming club was around 2000, at a place called “Orks.” It was a cramped semi-basement packed with people. But what else does a kid need to play games? Times change, however, and video games are becoming more of a spectator sport. We’re still a long way from the mainstream, but the Arena’s layout showed how much the functionality of a gaming club had evolved to cater to an audience.
As I mentioned, sales began after 10 PM. With our loot secured, we trudged home to, as the saying goes, “rush in” and install the game. The server restart was scheduled for 1 AM. I got home close to midnight, unpacked the collector’s edition, entered the code into my account, and logged in. I summoned my little Deathwing pet and ran around Stormwind. The servers were already lagging noticeably from the influx of players, and after the restart, the login server crashed completely. I decided to call it a night and try again the next day.
However, the login issues were far from over.
The Release of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm
After the release of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, nearly every server was plagued by one problem: queues. Some were longer, some shorter, but they were everywhere. I had gotten used to 400-600 person queues after transferring to Gordunni in 2009. Thirty or forty minutes isn’t a big deal; you just queue up and do something else. On that first evening, I tried to log in early, expecting a wait of about an hour. Instead, I was greeted with a queue of 2800+ people and an estimated wait time of over 200 minutes. I only managed to log in by a stroke of luck—I tabbed back in to check my spot and saw the server had just crashed and restarted.
The release brought a massive wave of players back to the game—likely more than even Blizzard had anticipated. A week before launch, a blue post stated that Blizzard had no plans to open new EU servers. This seemed like a strange decision, especially since they had to be expecting the return of long-retired veterans. They must have had a “Plan B” in case the servers became too crowded.
Sure enough, a few days later, players on the Russian servers got the good news: a new realm called “Goldrinn” (PvE) was being opened. Free character transfers were available from the most congested servers—including Gordunni—until December 13th.
That’s when I first started seriously thinking about transferring. Sitting in queues every night with the constant risk of being disconnected was not appealing, and being guildless meant my only option for raiding was with PUGs, which was depressing. But more on that later.
It took me five days to reach level 81, and I gained half of that level through archaeology while I had rested experience. At level 80, a single archaeology find yielded a whopping 11,000 experience with full rested XP (the blue bar), or 5,500 without it. That was a decent chunk, especially since the starting zones on Gordunni were an absolute chaotic mess for the first few days. I mostly dug up troll fragments in the
Eastern Kingdoms and saved the artifacts until after I hit 81 to get a quick skill-up boost.
For my actual combat leveling, I headed to Hyjal. I really enjoyed the zone, mainly for its diversity: a green forest, a scorched desert, a sand quarry, and a picturesque lake. Of course, the obsidian veins, which also gave a ton of experience, didn’t hurt. In other words, leveling my main was going smoothly.
Besides leveling, I was actively crafting. I entered Cataclysm with 90,000 gold and three max-level crafters. Remembering the old adage to strike while the iron is hot, I immediately leveled my DK’s professions. Alchemy took about an hour and 4,000 gold, but it paid for itself almost instantly. My first bar of Pyrium sold for 3,200 gold, and three Shadowspirit Diamonds went for 750 each. Even with expensive reagents, the profit was solid. Tailoring was also decent; crafted ilvl 330+ “blues” sold fairly quickly to players eager for upgrades. Engineering was the toughest to level, and sales were slow.
But Jewelcrafting was a killer. There were evenings when I’d pull ten or twelve thousand gold out of the mailbox.
What else was memorable about the first weeks of Cataclysm? The five-player heroics, of course. It was amusing to read the forums, which were flooded with complaints about the “difficult content.” For the last six months of WotLK, heroics were a mindless rush. The tank would pull everything, the DPS would AOE it all down, and the healer… well, the healer just trailed behind, occasionally tossing out an AOE heal. Suddenly, these heroes of Icecrown Citadel found themselves wiping on trash packs. Players had to relearn concepts like kill orders, crowd control, and pulling one pack at a time. The days of speed-running were over, and for a while, the difficulty was a real shock to the system. The same was true for raids; the heavily nerfed ICC had made players soft, and even the first few bosses in the new raids posed a challenge for many casual guilds.
Another point of contention was the underwater zone, Vashj’ir. Here, the designers experimented with three-dimensional combat, and not everyone was a fan of that. While flying offers freedom of movement, fighting underwater in Vashj’ir was a different beast. Some players struggled with judging distances to enemies and navigating the environment. Fortunately, the developers anticipated this and provided an alternative leveling zone: Deepholm.
Cataclysm was unique in its approach to new zones. Instead of a new continent, the new areas were scattered across the Old World, which itself had been completely redesigned.
I hit level 85 in Deepholm on January 10th while working on the Therazane quest chain. By then, I had about half of the solo content behind me, with Uldum and the Twilight Highlands still untouched. My group content progress was even slower; I had only been to three dungeons: Blackrock Caverns, Throne of the Tides, and The Stonecore. My leveling from 70 to 80 in WotLK had been much slower, taking two and a half months, during which I’d run every dungeon multiple times. A major factor in the faster pace this time, besides the ability to fly everywhere, was the removal of the mana bar for hunters. With the new Focus resource, I no longer had to stop to drink. Life as a hunter became much more fun, and the mobs felt weaker—if they even managed to reach me.
Overall, the atmosphere at the start of the expansion was fantastic. The rework of Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms gave everyone a reason to revisit these long-abandoned zones. Being able to fly over the Old World was a delight in itself, and the new quests integrated the classic continents into the current storyline. At first, it seemed like Blizzard had found the perfect formula for keeping old content relevant.
I wasn’t in any rush. I was quietly enjoying the questing and playing the auction house, and I even found a comfortable guild. “Anarion” was a small, casual guild that wasn’t focused on raiding, let alone progression. And frankly, after my previous experiences, I had no desire to join another group of hardcore “overcomers.”
Next: WoW Player Diary. Part 18. Returning to EU-realm
