TBC Button gone. The announcement thread isn't pinned.

[Thage]

Heh, that is the reality.
AoC can take the attention of a lot of players, which means customers. Blizzard has done this before.

Less "scared of" and more "Blizzard has a long history of trying to steal the thunder from competitors' major releases." Throughout the game's history, they've lined up patch or expansion launches to be within the same window (give or take a month) as launches/expansion launches/major anticipated patches from other MMORPGs, and increasingly did so through Legion's patch cycle, almost perfectly timing patch releases with FFXIV's patch cycle in Stormblood. BFA patches tended to coincide with patch releases in Shadowbringers, as well, albeit at a slower overall pace due to the shift to work-from-home necessitated by pandemic restrictions in California (Square-Enix had to do something similar, but had a lot of work frontloaded that helped them avoid the absolute worst of it).

All this is to say, I'm not surprised Blizzard originally timed BC prepatch/launch to steal Ashes of Creation's thunder, but at the same time, I highly doubt they're going to delay and extend prepatch just to try and do so again now that their release date is locked in (and unlike with 1.13 Classic, all the hard work for setting these servers up has already been done, making BC Classic a comparatively much less developer-intensive process).

[Prag]

It is "Ashes of Creation". Used to stand for "Age of Conan" - yeah, THAT MMO where ppl also claimed:



..and they claimed it for Aion, Rift, SW:ToR, GW, Wildstar etc etc....yet it seems people just left WoW and that was that.

The "WOW Killer" meme has been particularly enjoyable over the years. Some great titles (I really enjoyed Rift and GW2), but only WoW can kill WoW.

[shise]

Less "scared of" and more "Blizzard has a long history of trying to steal the thunder from competitors' major releases." Throughout the game's history, they've lined up patch or expansion launches to be within the same window (give or take a month) as launches/expansion launches/major anticipated patches from other MMORPGs, and increasingly did so through Legion's patch cycle, almost perfectly timing patch releases with FFXIV's patch cycle in Stormblood. BFA patches tended to coincide with patch releases in Shadowbringers, as well, albeit at a slower overall pace due to the shift to work-from-home necessitated by pandemic restrictions in California (Square-Enix had to do something similar, but had a lot of work frontloaded that helped them avoid the absolute worst of it).

All this is to say, I'm not surprised Blizzard originally timed BC prepatch/launch to steal Ashes of Creation's thunder, but at the same time, I highly doubt they're going to delay and extend prepatch just to try and do so again now that their release date is locked in (and unlike with 1.13 Classic, all the hard work for setting these servers up has already been done, making BC Classic a comparatively much less developer-intensive process).

Yes, that is exactly how it is. I don´t mean that they are scared, was just a play of words to reply to the previous poster.
But exactly as you say, they´ve done this before. It is also a pretty normal thing among many other games.

[Coffeh]

The "WOW Killer" meme has been particularly enjoyable over the years. Some great titles (I really enjoyed Rift and GW2), but only WoW can kill WoW.

And it has.

[Drench]

Yes blizzard is so scared of a crappy AOC game that AOC changes their date rofl.

[msdos]

People have been bottled up, waiting 2 years to be able to talk about "WoW killer", you can tell because they themselves bring it up and start passionately rambling about it if you even so much as HINT to WoW having competition lmao, even though we all know WoW for sure staggers releases around Final Fantasy.

It's the one thing they can be right about, so naturally they are going to flock to it as a point of contention.

[ryjkur]

And it has.

WoW has been dead according to MMO-C since 2007