Ah, Alterac Valley. That battleground and I spent thousands of hours together back in the early days of World of Warcraft. I remember its toddler years, back when it took days to win lose the map, and its awkward teen years, when there may as well have been no enemy players since everyone was zerging as fast as possible for the commander huts and ignoring each other on the way there.
Blizzard remembers too; it says it’s resurrecting a very specific version of the old AV for these vanilla servers.
“First and foremost, we’re planning to use the 1.12 version of Alterac Valley,” Blizzard posted today. “For many parts of the game like this, we’re picking an original WoW patch that gives us the most clarity for WoW: Classic, and 1.12 is that patch. In Alterac Valley, that puts us before the introduction of reinforcements. It puts us before the removal of all of the Commanders and Lieutenants. The only win conditions are the killing of Drek’thar in Frostwolf Keep or Vanndar Stormpike in Dun Baldar.”
Blizzard suggests that this particular moment in time cuts down on the number of NPCs bosses that needed to be taken down as well as encourages side activities (like turning in armor scraps). Oh, and no Korak. Awww. The downside is that it kinda sounds as if PvP battlegrounds won’t be launching right away with the rest of the game.
Meanwhile, the company is talking up its latest cosmetics sale, a quarter of the proceeds of which will go toward the WoW esports prize pool, which is… well, nothing about this is likely to make you want to buy stuff, is it.
