WoW Classic players are already beating Molten Core's first 40-man raids less than a week after the game became available. WoW Classic is as close a recreation of the vanilla WoW experience as developer Blizzard could manage, successfully replicating both the visual style, UI, and gameplay mechanics that were present in the original WoW experience, even if that means resurrecting some of WoW's bugs, too.
WoW Classic's launch has been as impressive as it has been rocky, in true vanilla WoW style. Blizzard famously warned players who had pre-registered for specific NA and EU realms on WoW Classic that the developer was anticipating absurd wait times on the most popular choices, opening new realms just hours before the game launched in an attempt to alleviate the congestion. While that worked on some of the lower population realms, others weren't so lucky, with wait times over six hours common on high volume servers. In essence, a smooth launch was predictably plagued by the fact that WoW Classic was too popular.
The game's popularity hasn't waned much in the days since, but additional servers - and, presumably, less people with time booked off from work - has made progression much more reasonable for scores of heroes. That's culminated in some WoW Classic players already beating Molten Core's first 40-man raids, less than a week after the game launched. For comparison's sake, according to Kotaku, it took players five months in original WoW to accomplish the same feat. European guild APES has been tagged as the first guild to complete the milestone of taking down WoW Classic's first two 40-man raids. Here's the group's world first Ragnaros victory captured on YouTube, as it's an absolute thing of beauty:
Obviously, things are going to be quicker the second time around for most milestones in WoW Classic. With a game that hasn't changed from its previous decades-old iteration, players have both prior experience to lean on and the benefit of months of planning after co-ordinating guilds and raid groups ahead of launch. Still, that doesn't change the fact that it's an impressive feat. Six days is not a lot of time for anything, let alone progressing through WoW Classic's laborious grind to level 60 and finding the appropriate gear for raiding.
WoW Classic has been a fascinating study in the effectiveness of nostalgia on a game's popularity. Players are dealing with all of the less popular design elements the game currently possesses because it is a time capsule into a simpler, more innovative time for the MMORPG genre. Whether or not that holds for the months following the game's release, it's been a wild ride so far, and achievements like APES' world first Molten Core clear will live on in legend far after the old-but-new dazzle of WoW Classic begins to fade.
Source: APES/YouTube (via Kotaku)