Blizzard has announced the release date of World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade Classic, as well as additional services such as Dark Portal Pass, Deluxe Edition and character cloning, and the situation doesn’t look good for gamers.

Let’s tell them the prices first. Dark Portal Pass is $40, Deluxe Edition is $70, and character cloning is $35.

Dark Portal Passallows you to boost your character in a Burning Crusade Classic and has extras such as race-specific mounts, a few bags, some gold. In addition to dark portal pass content, the Deluxe Edition also includes a special mount, special costume and special items. That’s standard stuff. The reaction is the price of character cloning.

Here’s the thing. As you read in the release date news, with Burning Crusade, players will choose to stay on the classic server or switch to Burning Crusade servers. Blizzard will have created a copy of your character on both sides, and when you select one of them, you will be unable to use the other. So if you say, “I want to play TBC,” your character on the classic servers will be rendered inactive.

Amaaaa. If you give $35, the passive character will also be activated, which means that you will be able to play with your character on the vanilla server at any time, TBC, at any time. The detail here is that Blizzard doesn’t make any extra effort to clone characters when you give him that money. The characters are already cloned, asking you for money to access this character, and that’s as much as $35 ($280).

There are serious reactions to this price in wow-related forums, especially Reddit. It was known that this service would be paid, but the price most people estimated was around $10. The move will likely force most people to switch to TBC, and the number of players in the Classic will also drop significantly. We’ll see in the coming days if Blizzard changes the price in response, or if there’s an explanation.