First Discovery
About a year ago or so I found the Project Ascension private server and played it for a while. This server is a Burning Crusade Classic server with class changes and other innovative changes.
I like several things about their ideas for a Wow Server:
- Extremely flexible class idea where you can pick and choose skills from any of the classes.
- Ability to tame pets from Elemental, Dragonkin, and Demonkin as well as Hunter Pets.
- Easy and free rank up of your skills.
- Reasonably fast progression – at least at the time of my starting.
- Good population so dungeon queue times were reasonable.
However, after a few weeks, I stopped playing. After I was able to level a couple of characters to level 70, and obtain flight in Outland, but then something changed and progression was so slow that everything felt like a grind. When I play a private server on any game, I don’t necessarily want an instant progression or boost to max level, but I don’t want a grind either. I expect a better progression than the original / retail game tho. If I were wanting a normal level of progression then I would just play the retail game. I didn’t figure out what changed at that time. So I know there are folks that enjoy the “Hardcore” experience where one death ends the character and you start over. I’m not a Hardcore kinda guy.
Recent Experience
A few weeks ago I came back to try again and found that progression was again great. I was able to get levels by playing dungeons – the only option is random dungeons from either Classic or Burning Crusade. So great. I leveled a couple of characters to 70 and obtained flight. And while working on my 3rd or fourth character this time, the server started restarting very often. Apparently the devs are pushing toward a WOTLK classic upgrade using the public realm rather than their PTR – which for some really odd reason, they think they can charge money. So you need to donate money to play the PTR. Meanwhile they were restarting the server, or crashing it, several times a day as they were progressing the main realm – Area52 they call it.
A couple of weeks ago I made a video about questing in Duskwallow Marsh doing quests.
Change in Progression
Notice the XP gain from running a dungeon. About 5% of a level.
So I’m working on my 3rd character to get to 70 and flight, and some change about a week ago caused a drastic reduction in progression. From getting from a half a level to a whole level of experience from a dungeon, I was down to getting only about 5% or less of a level for running a dungeon.
Item Value Change
Notice the change in the item value from 3 gold to a few silver.
And then yesterday, the final straw struck. They made a change that reduced the price of all items to 20% [or so] of their previous value. I immediately noticed that items in my bags were way lower after the server restarted. But then I noticed that the prices of items I was wearing had not changed. Apparently they overlooked that. And so I was, for example, wearing a plate chest piece worth over 3 gold, but a similar piece of armor in my bags was only a few silver. They did not steal 80% of the gold I was holding in my inventory. Nice of them.
Causing a Massive Grind
So what’s the impact of these changes?
- Leveling a character – say from 60 to 70 – goes from a couple of days to many days due to the much lower XP Gain from dungeons.
- Gold for Flight and a flying mount, which is almost 700 gold, goes from “you have it when you reach 70” to “you have to work many many more hours to get the gold”.
“Core Changes?”
So some posting in the Discord talked about “Core Changes” that the recent updates were making. Apparently these are changes to prepare for the WotLK Classic update they are planning.
So, either these progression / Gold Value changes are a unforeseen mistake, or an intended change to prepare for the WotLK update. So either they are so incompetent that they took these changes to the live server without seeing first what would happen on the PTR realm, or they somehow think that making the game more than 5 times harder to play is a good idea.
Either way, I’m outta here.
My suggestion is don’t waste your time. I may try things again in a few months to see if they straightened things out, but for now I’ll go off to play games that I pay for and enjoy:
Elder Scrolls Online
Final Fantasy XIV
Guild Wars 2
May your quiver always be full.
:ww
Windy Weather 