Classic World of Warcraft Discussion [Megathread]

[Deleted]

Yes, the subscriber is the entity. When two accounts have the same subscriber, though, it's just one subscriber holding two accounts. One person holding two subscriptions is still just one subscriber. The person doesn't magically splits in two.

No, person paying for 2 accounts are 2 entities. Entity = subscriber = 1 subscription fee.

It doesn't matter how many people are behind keyboard because its impossible to know. We are not talking about number of passengers on bus - we are talking about virtual internet world. Therefore we must count in metric that is available - number of subscribers. That's how all companies count their customers.

[Lolsteak]

Just because it was illegal does not make them criminal. They were all highly skilled engineers passionate about Warcraft and provided countless hours of their own time to please a large population. They never forced anyone to buy into their project or demand repayment for services. They offer valuable skills and they have learned a lot (as they have mentioned) about how servers function and run. I would be pleased to see their work endowed by Blizzard.

Just take a look at Project1999..

We have recently entered into a written agreement with Daybreak Game Company LLC that formally recognizes Project 1999 as a fan based, not-for-profit, classic EverQuest emulation project. The agreement establishes the guidelines that we as a project must follow, but it will allow to us continue to update the game without risk of legal repercussions.

Nost's "Open Letter to Blizzard" asks for policy changes regarding legacy servers based on volunteer work, All it would take is for Blizzard to allow them to run it not for profit and let them either crash or burn, No skin off Blizzard's back

[Kyanion]

Blizzard is small compared to the rest of the games industry.

Make your threats if you wish. You're nothing.

There is no threat, Blizz prolly does not care if you ever come back. Same with any super large video game company. They know they will lose X customers for various things they do. You can not please everyone.

[Deleted]

In other words, you want more proof that there is a demand for an ancient game for which you have to pay a monthly charge.

Yes, please. Proof us that vanilla unchanged from them but still costing you 13 bucks a month be played by 100k people.

[ls-]

And the reason it got all that advertisement was because it was the only server to have that quality in terms of scripting and bug fixing which was the result of a 6 year project.

People are where people go. It's like a snowball.

[Mullet Man]

This small group of fan's maintained one server, in one place and they were volunteers so not paid staff.

What you and the vanilla crowd just are not getting, is it won't be just vanilla either. It is only vanilla for you guys. There is likely a whole other crowd ready to jump on the bandwagon once they say yes to vanilla, to ask for TBC/WOTLK/CATA/MOP. They will also stomp their feet etc like the vanilla people, to get what they want.

Blizzard should have plan on how to move forward after they release the vanilla servers.
Players can either play under these rules or not play.

[Deleted]

You also don't get the logistics of it at all.

Oh please. I understand the logistics perfectly.

How's WoD working out for you?

Blizzard need proof that there is indeed a demand for legacy servers. That still might not be enough to change their minds, but how's WoD working out for you? It's great, right?

WoD has lost 60% of its subscribers. You can argue that WoW is at the end of its product life cycle all you want, but I heard this from people loyal to Blizzard during Cata. Then WoD reached 10 million subs at the beginning, then lost 6 million.

Sometimes you have to ask yourself if you want to deliberately kill WoW for ideological reasons or look at demand and the math.

It's up to you.

[Ielenia]

What is your experience with retention rates to call that number low? Absolutely none. Maybe its low, maybe its not. Only people running gaming companies would know.

While I don't have anything concrete to base the idea that the rate is low on, Blizzard's stance and replies over the years, stating that the interest is not enough to make classic servers worthwhile, lend credence to my idea.

[Deleted]

I'm actually kind of sad to see the amount of hate & vitriol in this thread. From both sides.

In the end we're all fans of Warcraft, no? I don't know why people are so irked over the notion that portions of the fanbase might enjoy a certain point in WoW's history more than what is currently being offered on Retail. Or vice versa.

I never got to fully experience Vanilla since I only started properly playing the game mid-TBC (and only really stopped playing during WoD), so I was super curious to dabble on Nost for a bit & see what the game was like back then. Consensus? Times were different. I really enjoyed my time there, made a lot of friends & ended up with more stories to tell than I've acquired in the last 6 or so years of playing Retail. I also left with the impression that Retail really is the better game but Vanilla is definitely the better MMORPG. Alas, that's just my experience & I sympathize wholly with people who feel differently.

It's entirely within Blizzard's rights to defend their IP & anyone playing on a private server should make their peace with the possibility of a shutdown at any moment very early on. But it just feels bad to lose a way of experiencing the vastly different game (& world) that was Vanilla WoW. My time on Nostalrius actually served to get me extremely passionate about the universe again & made me resub to Retail for a few months in a long while in addition to preordering Legion.

I'm now hoping with fingers crossed for Blizzard's own Legacy realms, I think there's definitely a profitable market to be had for it. Especially with the Nostalrius team offering to help out purely in a volunteer capacity.

Sorry for the long post, just felt like sharing.

-someone who loves both Vanilla & Retail, albeit for different reasons.

[Deleted]

Bitch please, Nost became so big thanks to PR on twitch, youtube, reddit, even MMOC and official forums suffered from Nost promo thread. I can't say that's a lack of advertisement.

Its all relative. Even with all that PR, compared to Blizzard's PR capabilities its very small.

Then you forget that almost all of that PR happened in last month or two.

[Deleted]

Yes, please. Proof us that vanilla unchanged from them but still costing you 13 bucks a month be played by 100k people.

150k people on Nost had trouble coughing up the $300 for server upkeep. I'm sure they'll be reaching for their credit cards the second Blizzard announces that 13 bucks a month vanilla service.... totally... *cough*

[Kyanion]

Problem is there are few factors that were intentionally omitted because they increase potential player base:

1. Lack of advertising. Private server didn't have any advertising, it tried to stay under radar. Vast majority of players didn't know about Nost. With Blizzard's advertising machine potential number of players could be 100 or 1000 times bigger.

2. Illegality of private servers and associated phobias, which scares some players away. People are afraid of keyloggers, and rightfully so. They would never play on anything unofficial.

3. Retention rate being labeled as "low". Maybe its low, maybe it isn't. We don't know. Using such label is not looking at stats objectively.

4. There are more private servers. Nost wasn't the only 1.

1. Kind of hard to advertise something that is illegal.

2. Scares people away with good reason. Shit is illegal, keyloggers/spyware/viruses. Who knows when you start taking extra lengths to find a way to play Vanilla.

3. *shrugs* It is opinion sure, but don't forget we are talking about FREE game with that retention rate. Just know whatever that number is it WILL go down when money becomes a factor.

4. Sure there are plenty of buggy/illegal/shitty PS out there. Some of them might have good quality, but once people figure out the good ones only a matter of time til they get the Nost treatment and those people have to start over. Again. Starts to not become worth it imo.

[MoanaLisa]

150k was just a single private server and those just with enough care and balls to try that route. Having official blizz servers would gather a lot more than a few hundred k players. I would even bet that given a long term it would outnumber the latest expansion subs since their all severe trash.

Would it if they had to pay $15/month for access? I don't see it. I'm aware that some people are saying they would but Nostralrius's own statistics tell us things:

Retention on a free and very well-run vanilla server: Less than 20%.

I see a lot of rage and emotion in this thread but few people willing to consider the actual facts on the ground.

1. There is no 'right' to play old versions of video games.
2. Blizzard is fully on the record about this and the uproar over shutting down a private and infringing server doesn't change anything.
3. I'm quite sure that Blizzard has been aware of Nostalrius's success yet still shows no interest.
4. Comparison of people playing for free and in some sense the ability to stick it to Blizzard in the process to an unknown potential audience doesn't make sense.
5. Blizzard's lack of interest in starting a new project that will only play to perhaps 200K players, most of which are not interested in paying.
6. Why do we know that there's little interest in paying? Check the posts about Nostalrius's donations strategy, later withdrawn. Hosting cost was an ongoing issue.

If I objectively looking at this I would think the effort behind Nostalrius was cool but doomed. The underlying problems are serious enough on their own. Adding a requirement for a monthly cost makes it look like a non-starter. And then there are the technical issues which many here do not understand in any serious way.

Latest expansion subs number in the millions. How many millions we don't know but it is surely much, much greater than what was current at Nost which, again, was free, well organized, well-scripted and generally an admirable if doomed illegal project.

[Gadzooks]

Yeah man, and I am glad it's getting the attention it needs. It is unfortunate though that our side has people unwilling to listen to the actual facts that anti-vanilla people are giving them. Private servers will continue to pop up as they have before and eventually (hopefully) Blizzard will adjust either their stance on the matter or allow their copyright to include accessibility to private servers (so long as zero profit is earned and the end product is offered for free).

Blizzard will never alter their copyright to allow private servers. They as a company (regardless of what we think of their products) care about the fit and finish of their games, and will keep everything in-house.

They will also never, ever offer the game as a license, unless it's to the licensee's they work with in the EU, SA, and Asia. Doing that means they allow outsiders access to the real, working servers, which are Blizzard's crown jewels, and there's no way in hell they're letting anyone near that without a huge financial investment and serious NDAs and months of meetings with lawyers to hammer out the contracts.

I could see them offering a vanilla server when the official game is ended. I don't see it happening until then, and even then, it's iffy. Blizzard is NOT a company that looks back often, more likely when WoW is near it's end, their server farms for the game will be sold off or repurposed for new projects, not nostalgia servers.

Unless there's a sea-change in the attitude in WoW's management, "No" is the only answer I see for the foreseeable future - and as WoW's popularity declines, so does the opportunity to sit down with Morhaime and propose spending millions of dollars on nostalgia-based products. They won't even officially put dev money or time into bringing older games current, which financially is considerably less in cost and time than WoW vanilla servers.

The economics of vanilla servers is the issue. All of the pleading, logic bending and daydream level "plans" in this thread will never overcome the bleak reality of the dollars and cents it would cost for this project, and that Blizzard is unwilling to throw millions of dollars away on a product with no shelf life or any expectations of any - and they would have to answer to the investors on this issue, too. But any time the financial issue comes up, the illegal server crowd blows it off as "lies" or being untrue, and that mounting a project like this is trivial, when it's been explained hundreds of times over the years that it simply isn't.

You want vanilla servers. Fine. Keep wanting them. I only get into the discussion when falsehoods about copyright are thrown around, which is something important to me, and to post the reality of the issue, not the daydreams and demands of a small group of people.

[Random010203]

Nost's "Open Letter to Blizzard" asks for policy changes regarding legacy servers based on volunteer work, All it would take is for Blizzard to allow them to run it not for profit and let them either crash or burn, No skin off Blizzard's back

Pretty much this, both sides win, it costs virtually nothing, and the only people who end up being upset are the people who don't like compromise. This event could have set a nice precedent for both parties through mutual teamwork. Instead, all this has happened.

[Kyanion]

I went to google a bit and it doesn't look bad at all. https://www.superdataresearch.com/bl...mmo-retention/
F2p mmo retention rate drops really rapidly. Just for a player to continue playing for a half year from the launch month is around 10%. This 18% looks godly to me. But we have no real dates when players started or stopped and thus can't say that much of retention.

I mean we also are forgetting something. Do we know for a fact that the numbers Nost put out are factual? Could they just have doctored the numbers to make themselves look better than they are?

[Deleted]

While I don't have anything concrete to base the idea that the rate is low on, Blizzard's stance and replies over the years, stating that the interest is not enough to make classic servers worthwhile, lend credence to my idea.

Where did they say that?

[Propainn]

150k people on Nost had trouble coughing up the $300 for server upkeep. I'm sure they'll be reaching for their credit cards the second Blizzard announces that 13 bucks a month vanilla service.... totally... *cough*

Bold faced lie, and a perpetuation of some random forum rumor.

In the same vein, I might as well say that Blizzard 100% can do this no problem whatsoever. Both of these statements are equal parts bullshit.

[Ielenia]

Because they used wrong word. What they meant is accounts.

Unless you are very dense, you understand that it was their mistake. You could have corrected them instead of trolling.

You can't say that it was their mistake because, even after pointing it out, they kept using 'players' instead of 'accounts'.

[zorkuus]

Pretty much this, both sides win, it costs virtually nothing, and the only people who end up being upset are the people who don't like compromise. This event could have set a nice precedent for both parties through mutual teamwork. Instead, all this has happened.

Well they should've thought about it BEFORE they opened an illegal server. You ask permission BEFORE, not after.