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It is well known that the Vanilla ranking system is extremely time-intensive, and those who seek to get rank 14 might be investing upwards of 40-60 hours per week PVPing in battlegrounds. This is due to the extreme decay at the higher ranks that requires a high weekly PVP standing to progress further. While you would be hard-pressed to find many people who think it is a good system, it was implemented in its original format in the 2019 re-release of Classic WoW.
Season of Mastery still saw the same degree of degenerate play to get rank 14 with players PVPing non-stop, except there was a change that halved the time that it would take to get to rank 14. In fact, many players did not realise that the Season of Mastery ranking schedule became active on Classic Era. Whether this was intended or not is unknown.
No other changes to the PVP system in classic WoW have been seen or mentioned, until now.
On May 22, 2023 Aggrend, one of the Classic WoW developers announced that a change that will be better for the health of the servers is coming. And, in order for this change to take effect, they will be resetting people’s ranking progress. Considering how time-intensive ranking is, you will want to finish your ranking goals because the reset will happen in 8-12 weeks.
This is a huge change, and is somewhat scary. One fear is that the items will be sold from the vendor for an amount of honor and battleground marks of honor just like was available in The Burning Crusade pre-patch. If this change comes into affect, items that less than 1% of the playerbase acquired will be easily accessible by others. Naturally, players who spent an egregious amount of time getting these items will feel cheated.
The consensus of players is the hope that the change removes the incredible time sink the system requires, but is still difficult to achieve and will retain the prestige of the items.
What do you think will happen? Share your thoughts in the comments.