Our Christmas Carol begins “Hardcore was dead, to begin with.”

Skull Rock was very quiet and I kept hearing chatter that all the players left for the Season of Discovery servers. And I missed battlegrounds. I recognize that concentrated PvP with permadeath would be inherently ridiculous but I’d do it. It would be fascinating to see how player behavior changed and how some of these maps would play with everyone acting very cautious.

I also missed roleplay ruleset servers. I was surprised to find no overlap with hardcore servers because the entire hardcore challenge is basically roleplaying; it’s trying to fill in the gaps left to your imagination with realistic motivations and consequences.

Padmina	20	150 Herbalism	140 Alchemy	150 Cooking	143 Fishing	77 First Aid
Evania	12	75 Herbalism	85 Tailoring	39 Cooking	57 Fishing	2 First Aid
Elnora	12	75 Herbalism	27 Enchanting	63 Cooking	88 Fishing	18 First Aid

I made a gnome warlock and a human priest on Chaos Bolt (NA), an RPPvP server.

Trink	13	85 Engineering	76 Mining	61 Cooking	85 Fishing	2 First Aid
Eglantine	6			26 Cooking	44 Fishing

I would probably be better off if I’d learned a language or something instead of memorizing Elwynn Forest, but those neurons are having fun firing again.

This server is bustling, and since Season of Discovery eventually ends, it meets my goal of wanting an experience that’s finite. Both discovering and using runes is fun. There are now so many variations that World of Warcraft is more of a game system than a game, and I wonder if we’ll ever see Blizzard completely embrace that and let players officially create custom experiences for one another the way they have with Overwatch.