After two years of anticipation and months closed beta streams, World of Warcraft Classic (WoW Classic) finally launched on August 27, 2019, with over a million viewers tuning in to its Twitch channel when it premiered. This is great free publicity for Blizzard, as many streamers who do not usually play MMORPGs, such as Shroud and TimTheTatMan have now introduced their thousands of fans to a game that they may have never otherwise been motivated to look into.
But, along with this awareness also comes the desire of these fans to try to join their favorite streamer’s server in order to join them on their adventures. While this is certainly beneficial in keeping the server populations up, there are a few other factors, both positive and negative, to consider before players decide to join a server that is populated by major streamers:
Positive:
- You get to play with your favorite streamer.
- The opportunity to play and interact with fellow members of the community that you’ve been part of for ages might make the community experience feel less passive and more concrete and meaningful. You might also find friends to go adventuring with when you’re not assisting your streamer.
- You get shared XP, however the amount of XP that you receive is directly affected by your current level in relation to the other player’s level. If your level is lower, then you will receive less XP than if you played with others who were at a similar level to you. As WoW Classic just launched, there shouldn’t be that much of a level discrepancy between party members yet.
- You won’t struggle to find people to play with online.
Negative:
- You’ll be playing as a grunt in the streamer’s army. If you’re happy just being a part of someone else’s adventure, then journey on.
- The hours-long queues for entering servers may only make sense to students who can join the queue before class or on weekends when you have a few errands to run.
- The factions may be imbalanced in favor of the streamer’s faction, thereby giving the opposing faction an unfair disadvantage in PvP skirmishes. So, if the streamer chooses Alliance and you choose Horde, you may also find yourself being ganked a lot more frequently than you are comfortable with. Unless you’re only joining for trolling purposes.
- It will be difficult to have a true RPG experience when many of the server’s players are focused on a streamer rather than immersion.
- WoW Vanilla originally launched in 2004, so one could assume that a significant portion of the WoW community are in the older Twitch demographic, since while 73% of Twitch users are between 18 and 49. However, aside from the nostalgia streamers, there are also younger streamers like Sodapoppin who have a similarly younger audience. This means that those following them onto their server might be younger than their older WoW contemporaries might be interested in playing with.
If you’re interested in finding out which server to join to find your favorite streamers, or which not to visit to avoid all streamers, then this website is a useful resource to try.