If you’ve been a lapsed World of Warcraft player for the past 10-plus years, you’ve probably let some relationships fall by the wayside—for example, the entire guild that formed the core of your social life when you were in a suffocatingly small Christian high school in Texas. Maybe you’ve found yourself sipping a beverage in the loneliest corner of your local bar wondering, “What ever happened to those folks?” and “Why didn’t they let complete my tier 2 armor set before the first expansion came out, those dicks?” Well, with WoW Classic around the corner, Blizzard is now trying to help you (and certainly not me) get answers to both of those questions.
Blizzard has launched a forum tool called “Classic Connections 2004-2006” with the goal of helping pre-expansion WoW players find each other again. Its structure is simple: You start by selecting Horde or Alliance, and then what type of server—PVE, PVP, role-playing PVE, or role-playing PVP—you used to play on. From there, you choose your old server and then post who you were. Blizzard recommends starting with your character’s name, race, class, and guild, as well as the character names of people you’re hoping to tearfully embrace when WoW Classic launches in a few weeks.
It’s a cool idea, and I’m glad Blizzard’s doing it. That said, the company hasn’t done a great job of publicizing it so far, and it shows. When I first learned about the tool, I made a beeline to the section for my old server, Thunderlord. It was never the most popular server, but I was hoping to see one or two familiar faces on its Classic Connections page. Instead, it was a ghost town, with just nine posts as of this publishing. I got a nostalgic dopamine boost from recognizing a couple ancient guild names, but otherwise, I came away from the reanimated skeleton of my teenage years with more questions than answers.
On that note, if anybody reading this ever played with a Tauren Shaman named “Atnhan” (creative, I know) on Thunderlord, that was me. Hit me up! Unless you hated me, in which case, don’t!