On WoW: TBC Classic and its “Editions”

So, it’s apparently official. World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Classic is scheduled to be fully playable as of sometime on Tuesday, June 1st, 2021. As far as I’m currently aware, TBC Classic will be released as part of that “global release schedule” thing Blizzard has used in the past with a couple of modern World of Warcraft expansions. According to the currently-published schedule, The Burning Crusade Classic will theoretically be live at 3PM Pacific Time. That translates to 7PM BRT in Brazil, the stroke of midnight CEST on June 2nd in Paris, 8AM AEST in Australia, and so on.

However, the precise hour at which The Burning Crusade Classic will be out and playable is not what I’m here to speculate about today. Instead, I’m here to offer my thoughts on something I consider much more dire on the part of Blizzard. You see, I mentioned in my news report where Blizzard officially confirmed the initially-leaked launch date that there will be several different “editions” of The Burning Crusade Classic.

Before we dive into that topic, though, I think I need to clarify a thing or two. Despite the existence of these various purchasable “editions” of TBC Classic, it’s crucial to note that you are not required to purchase any of them in order to actually access the expansion’s content once it’s out. Unless Blizzard suddenly does an about-face in regards to their pricing policy when it comes to World of Warcraft Classic (which I sincerely hope doesn’t happen), all you need to play The Burning Crusade is an active subscription to modern World of Warcraft.

Alright, now that I believe I’ve clarified everything, we can brave the depths of the topic I wish to discuss today. The first thing I want to bring up is the “character cloning” system that will be available once The Burning Crusade Classic is live. That is, Blizzard will grant existing WoW Classic players the ability to both keep their current Classic characters as they are and transfer them to Burning Crusade-exclusive servers.

Essentially, if what I’ve just said doesn’t quite make sense, all you need to know is that if you clone any characters over to TBC servers, you’ll still be able to play those characters on “vanilla” Classic servers as they were before The Burning Crusade launched. I’ve referred to this concept in the past as the ability for Classic players to have their proverbial cake and eat it too, but this ability is not without its price. This is but one aspect of TBC Classic’s launch that has players up in arms.

PC Gamer reports that a per-character fee of $35 USD will apply for anyone who wishes to “have the best of both worlds,” so to speak. Once The Burning Crusade’s pre-expansion update (or “pre-patch,” for short) goes live on Tuesday, May 18th, players will be forced to choose between moving their characters forward into the expansion or keeping them as they are in “vanilla” Classic. That is unless players are willing to fork over what I suspect Blizzard might call a “paltry” $35 fee to clone one of their characters.

PC Gamer goes on to add in their report that many Classic players strongly oppose this fee and think it will essentially kill “vanilla” Classic. That’s the theory because it’s suspected that most people who can’t afford to clone a character (or just plain don’t want to) will move ahead to The Burning Crusade and leave regular Classic in the dust.

One comment quoted in PC Gamer’s article stated that the person behind the comment knew people who probably would have cloned a character or two just because they could if the price were, say, $10 instead of a much more astronomical $35. “It’s such a shameless money grab for a service that should have been included and free with the release of classic BC,” reads another quoted comment. I must say, I agree wholeheartedly with the message present in that comment. I think the phrase “shameless money grab” is quite appropriate here.

However, I’m afraid we’re just getting started, folks. There’s unfortunately also the topic of the so-called “Deluxe Edition” of The Burning Crusade Classic. This edition includes two mounts, one specifically meant for TBC Classic and one meant for modern WoW, a cosmetic Hearthstone effect for TBC Classic, an equally-cosmetic toy also for TBC Classic, a single-use level 58 character boost for (you guessed it) TBC Classic, and thirty days’ worth of game time.

Now, all of that may sound like a pretty sweet deal at first. Notice, however, that I haven’t told you the price for that bundle yet. The Burning Crusade Classic‘s Deluxe Edition clocks in at a hefty $69.99 USD. For comparison, allow me to remind you of the price for the so-called “Epic Edition” of World of Warcraft: Shadowlands. It includes many of the same types of things present in TBC Classic’s Deluxe Edition, like a character level boost, mount, and a month of game time, and costs $79.99 USD.

The obvious difference between those two packs is that you actually need to purchase Shadowlands in order to access that expansion’s content. I don’t think I need to remind you that The Burning Crusade Classic is essentially included for free in your subscription to retail World of Warcraft. It certainly seems to me as though Blizzard is hoping to dupe unsuspecting and/or careless players into dropping seventy bucks on a bunch of goodies that don’t even grant you access to new content as you would get for purchasing Shadowlands.

What if you don’t care about the mounts or the game time present in the Deluxe Edition of TBC Classic and just want the character boost, though? Well, in that case, according to Wowhead, you’ll be expected to cough up $39.99 USD for the one-time privilege of boosting a character to a level appropriate for The Burning Crusade’s content. Notice my usage of the phrase “one-time” in that last sentence.

Blizzard has clearly stated that these boosts (known officially as the “Dark Portal Pass”) can only be used once per World of Warcraft account. Furthermore, these boosts cannot be used on Draenei or Blood Elf characters. This is purely speculation on my part, but my gut tells me that Blizzard has made these TBC character boosts once-per-account because they don’t cost as much as the sixty-dollar Shadowlands-level character boosts do.

To conclude, I am aware that I’ve praised (and even defended) Blizzard when they’ve done certain things in the past. For example, I like to think I was among the first to jump for joy around this time last year when they enabled the double character experience and reputation buffs right after the COVID-19 pandemic began forcing people to stay indoors. Heck, I even rebuffed the idea that those buffs were a cynical cash-grab designed to get people to extend or reactivate their game subscriptions.

That was a long time ago, though. In my honest opinion, what Blizzard is doing in regards to the pricing of nearly everything concerning The Burning Crusade Classic is outright indefensible. I know my words don’t exactly cut very deep as far as Blizzard is concerned, but I felt that I had to get this off my chest. Oh, and for the record, I still think Blizzard should do something (anything) about Heroes of the Storm if they do absolutely nothing else for the rest of time.