Guest Blog Post: World of Warcraft Classic Sinks its Claws into Twitch and Ninja

Today’s guest blog post comes from occasional contributor and friend-of-the-blog Aaron Blackman.  Aaron often streams video game play on Monday nights at 7 p.m. at https://www.twitch.tv/flagg05 and he can be found on Twitter at @flagg05.

On August 26th 2019, Blizzard Entertainment did a curious thing. After announcing it two years prior, the company rereleased their monumental Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG), World of Warcraft. Dubbed World of Warcraft (WoW) Classic, the game strips away all of the game’s seven expansions, reducing most of the content and rolling back the gameplay to a place the game was in back in August 2006.

Diehard fans of the game had been craving a return to this experience. Nostalgia mixed with the original game mechanics and grind that made its debut in November 2004 brought a lot of players back to the fictional world of Azeroth. Blizzard vastly underestimated how popular WoW Classic would be, forcing the population into a handful of servers. These realms filled up so fast that a queue to get into the game would kick in, and with several thousand gamers waiting for their chance to play. My own main character is on the heavily populated Faerlina server, and I sat in queue with 18,706 players ahead of me in line the day after release.

During that first week of WoW Classic, streamers also flocked to the game, pushing their bodies to the limit with 24-hour streams. The audience was there too, over 1 million viewers were watching on launch day, and 47.1 million hours of the game were watched in the first week according to The Esports Observer.

Popular streamers like Shroud, TimTheTatman, Cloakzy and DrLupo all temporarily abandoned their main games to ride the WoW Classic hype train. What’s curious is that they all did so organically, they weren’t being paid as sponsored streamers to showcase the game. It was fascinating to see, as they enjoyed the game and a possible break from the games that bring them the highest number of viewers, and in turn, revenue. It seemed inevitable that World of Warcraft Classic would eventually pull Ninja into its orbit.

On Tuesday, I watched Ninja stream WoW Classic on Mixer  for around 45 minutes. I guess I was just curious. Would he like the game? Would the random passerby recognize him in-game? Would fans get upset that he wasn’t playing Fortnite?

The answer to all of those was a resounding yes. The game has its quirks, but Ninja seemed to be enjoying it quite a bit that first night he streamed the game. He even came back the next day for a 10-hour stream. Players followed him around the world like a lost puppy, hoping for a chance to see their character on his screen or for a shot to talk to the legend. As for the viewers on Mixer, Ninja had plenty of supporters excited for him changing things up, but others were vocally bored not shy to let everyone know that WoW wasn’t nearly as action-packed as Fortnite.

Prominent streamer Ninja playing the original World of Warcraft.

In World of Warcraft, players can group up into a party of five while wandering the lands of Azeroth, tackling difficult enemies or quests together. With Ninja’s character name “Ninjathewise” plastered on the top-left of the game, it’s easy for fans to search him out in the game and bombard him with party invitations. The constant stream of party invitations started to annoy the streamer, who eventually had to toggle the option to allow invitations off just so he could play the game.

Being famous also altered how Ninja approached the game, as his inventory was filled with large backpacks that are quite difficult to come by for such a low-level character. At Level 15, he was challenging enemies a few levels above him, but often found support from random viewers that were tagging along.

At other points, he still experienced what makes WoW Classic so special: the spontaneous community that is temporarily created while questing. Some quests require a special enemy to be defeated, who then drops a unique item needed to complete the quest. In current versions of WoW, anyone attacking that enemy could then pick up a copy of that item. In WoW Classic, only the first person or party to hit the enemy could get a copy (this is called tagging an enemy).

One way around this is to invite nearby players also on the same quest so more people can complete their tasks and move on, and ideally avoid waiting in line.

I’m curious to see how long streamers continue to play WoW Classic post-launch. Depending on what streamers look to do once they hit the max player level of 60, we’ll likely see a cycle of excitement as each phase of content is released, and then an inevitable decline over time. Until then, we’ll see that shift in video game focus like Ninja is having this week.