Sebastian Glanzer March 2nd, 2024 | 6:30 p.m. World of Warcraft: Videos, guides, news and more
On the night of March 1, 2024, the official self-found mode of the WoW Classic Hardcore servers started in Europe. The Challenge: Get a Classic character with one life to level 60 – but this time without interacting with the auction house, the postal system and without trading with players.
The developers have been working on a version like this for a long time, which parts of the hardcore community wanted. However, this implementation has many flawsas we will see below.
The worst timing
Source: Blizzard Phase 2 of Season of Discovery only recently started. Many WoW Classic players hang out there. The Self-Found also receives little attention. A real community event or a Large crowds for the new self-found mode are ruled out from the outsetas it was released at the worst possible time.
Phase 2 of Season of Discovery (SoD) was released not long ago. Although a lot of players have already reached the new maximum level of 40, an XP boost has also been implemented for characters up to level 25, which gives SoD players even more incentive to play their classic characters on the SoD servers.
No fresh servers
Source: buffed Self-Found players do not start on a new WoW Classic server, but on the already existing hardcore realms. Self-found characters are created on the already known hardcore servers. Whether you want to start as a normal or self-found character is simply determined using a checkbox when creating the character.
Self-found characters are thrown into the same pool with all other hardcore characters and can be found in the already established server structure, including bots and everything that goes with it. Next to the normal hardcore characters, self-found characters seem like foreign bodies because they are looking for the solo challenge and you can't trade with them.
No incentives
The developers actually worked on challenging classic content for half a year… but in the end no success, title or anything like that. brings in. Alternatively, the Self-Found debuff can simply be deactivated forever after you have started your Self-Found adventure.
The Self-Found mode of Classic Hardcore only exists for personal challenges and does not offer any rewards.
This was already the case with the normal hardcore servers. In the end, the raids were a new challenge. So with the self-found mode you only have one Implemented mode that some players may have already mastered on the hardcore servers (Reach level 60 without auction house and other player help).
Same content
Hardcore Self-Found could have been something special. However, there is no particularly special twist to the previous Classic experience, no new modes, no extra self-found boss or anything similar.
All of these points raise the question: Then why play Self-Found at all?
Game modes such as Hardcore and Self-Found like in Diablo 2 emerged from specially designed community challenges. Unfortunately, the official hardcore self-found challenge from WoW (buy now) Classic also eliminates the solo aspect and you can interact normally with other players again at any time. Do you also think this is a wasted opportunity and will you throw yourself into the new self-found mode?