Classic World of Warcraft Discussion [Megathread]

[Tuesdays]

Disclaimer: I'm not saying this is feasible. Just a thought.

It would be cool if Blizzard rereleased vanilla WoW, but reskinned and rethemed as World of Starcaft or World of Overwatch.
I know... I know... too much work. Too many issues.
Just would be a really fun and fresh way to experience vanilla like gameplay.

I hope the new Diablo project is a mmrpg, other than that Blizzard knows wow isn't going to last forever, medicating this ole girl is just delaying the inevitable at a cost, and they are not going to keep feeding a dead cow either (when it dies)

[Deleted]

Now, to be fair to Nostalrius: by the time it ended it was almost certainly way larger than Wildstar is at the moment.

Yeah, this exact thought has also crossed my mind a few times. Which makes me quite hopeful for actual Legacy servers at some point in the future.

Also, Nost was still in the process of growing quite fast before the hammer was bought down. Roughly gaining approx 10k active accounts each month.

[Deficineiron]

Well on Steam FF IV has 400k owners and 44k played in the last two weeks, so 11% or so. 7k peak concurrent players yesterday.

thanks. how might the steam number be expected to correlate to their overall numbers?

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It goes hand in hand good for customers = good for company.

Except for vanilla servers, moving on is good for the company; however putting all their eggs into one basket is going to kill them if they don't try.

you need to get with the times publicly traded corporations are aggressively sociopathic in their business plans.

[Mullet Man]

I hope the new Diablo project is a mmrpg, other than that Blizzard knows wow isn't going to last forever, medicating this ole girl is just delaying the inevitable at a cost, and they are not going to keep feeding a dead cow either (when it dies)

Maybe that is the plan? Continue to move WoW gameplay away from a traditional MMORPG, then release a new Blizzard MMORPG as World of Diablo/Starcraft/Overwatch. That would be awesome, and would restore my faith in Blizzard.

[Tuesdays]

thanks. how might the steam number be expected to correlate to their overall numbers?

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you need to get with the times publicly traded corporations are aggressively sociopathic in their business plans.

I understand, but they are not about to throw away money just because "yolo"

[Mullet Man]

Dude, world of Diablo. You wouldn't even need to change the game mechanics all that much, although for the "feel" of Diablo to be retained you'd probably need a lot more cleaves and/or cone attacks. Can't go around killing hordes of monsters one at a time in Diablo, after all.

Yes!
/10 char

[Guy4123]

thanks. how might the steam number be expected to correlate to their overall numbers?

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you need to get with the times publicly traded corporations are aggressively sociopathic in their business plans.

I'm not really sure but if you use the steam data as a sizeable polling then the rest is probably similar.

[Deficineiron]

I understand, but they are not about to throw away money just because "yolo"

they think differently and I am not trying to be cute. Just look at how Kotick terminated a number of titles that came from vivendi. If it isn't going to be a possible 9-digit producer, that alone is a red flag for it. Who knows, beyond that, the internal politics at blizzard on this.

I offered one idea - that blizzard would have to 'modernize' and LFR'ize a classic release, in a 4.x++ engine, flying, LFD LFR Achievements, mobs that tickle not hit, easy questing with handholding, fast leveling, multiple raid difficulties, mass nerfing of instances, removal of confusing old talent trees, long old bg maps, etc., and market it to their current playerbase, rather than just make a classic server. Perhaps the blizzard mgmt would rather just let classic rest in peace rather than raise it and then dismember it in this fashion.

to be clear, I am saying blizzard would be told they have to market classic for their CURRENT playerbase, and tune/prune accordingly. Everyone will kill nef and vael and cthun and KT, and they will do it in LFR within days of it being opened. dungeons will be 15 minute funruns, and who knows what they would do to keep folks from getting lost in brd, stratholme, scholo (old), lbrd/ubrs, etc.

[Darsithis]

At least SOMEONE was using it.. Blizz still doing nothing for their paying sub base while the elite few sit on Alpha playing their hearts out.

I don't get why people want, so badly, to play in the alpha. Y'all bitch and moan so much about "no content!" but you'd rather see the content for Legion now so that when it finally does come out, you've already experienced it all. Then you'll just complain that there is no new content.

[Holtzmann]

I suspect the potential retail pool for such a server is higher than nost's population was. As you note, I have no more evidence for this than any of the other pundits here.

You are absolutely correct in that. The retail pool for a Classic server being bigger than Nost's population, that is. World of Warcraft had, after all, over a hundred million accounts created for it, between full accounts and trial versions. That is an enormous amount of people who would potentially be interested in Classic servers.

Whether that potential is enough to warrant the creation of said servers, unfortunately, is Blizzard's call. They are very conservative when it comes to applying large amounts of resources to a new project like that (Hearthstone being a serendipitous success story notwithstanding), and there are also philosophical hurdles to get over ("we want to move the game forward", et cetera).

Yeah, this exact thought has also crossed my mind a few times. Which makes me quite hopeful for actual Legacy servers at some point in the future.

Also, Nost was still in the process of growing quite fast before the hammer was bought down. Roughly gaining approx 10k active accounts each month.

Yeah, you can tell their retention was slowly increasing between their PvP server's 1st anniversary and the time they closed down (assuming all numbers reported are honest, of course). Although that might have been due to the new PvE server. I know for a fact a lot of people won't touch PvP servers with a standard issue 10' pole (me included), so those people would have held off on playing on Nostalrius until a PvE option presented itself.

[Deleted]

I suspect the potential retail pool for such a server is higher than nost's population was. As you note, I have no more evidence for this than any of the other pundits here.

No, but it's interesting to spitball around, if nothing else.
The state of the MMOs is quite abysmal at the moment, so I fully understand that people are looking for the authentic "old skool" option.
Even for things like Wildstar that were designed to fill that gap - but completely failed to understand why the original WoW was such a hit.
I think there might be some support for a "retro" game resurrection. Probably only for a very short while though, but with right game in right place, I bet someone could make big bucks for a year or two, before the paleo-hipster trend passes

Having said that - I don't have any idea how the Nost crowd would react to being monetized. And we'll never know. But it's "fun" to speculate.

[Deleted]

Having said that - I don't have any idea how the Nost crowd would react to being monetized. And we'll never know. But it's "fun" to speculate.

I'd love a poll on this by Blizzard to be honest.

[Mullet Man]

I don't get why people want, so badly, to play in the alpha. Y'all bitch and moan so much about "no content!" but you'd rather see the content for Legion now so that when it finally does come out, you've already experienced it all. Then you'll just complain that there is no new content.

Its an exclusive club. People like being part of exclusive clubs.
Plus, people are very bored with WoD.

[Deleted]

I don't get why people want, so badly, to play in the alpha. Y'all bitch and moan so much about "no content!" but you'd rather see the content for Legion now so that when it finally does come out, you've already experienced it all. Then you'll just complain that there is no new content.

I've had alpha for a while, but not logging in.
For one - I'm not a free QA-resource. My testing hours cost money and I'm not on Blizzard payroll.
And for second - the reason you mentioned. I don't want to be "bored and out of content" when it launches.

[Tuesdays]

they think differently and I am not trying to be cute. Just look at how Kotick terminated a number of titles that came from vivendi. If it isn't going to be a possible 9-digit producer, that alone is a red flag for it. Who knows, beyond that, the internal politics at blizzard on this.

I offered one idea - that blizzard would have to 'modernize' and LFR'ize a classic release, in a 4.x++ engine, flying, LFD LFR Achievements, mobs that tickle not hit, easy questing with handholding, fast leveling, multiple raid difficulties, mass nerfing of instances, removal of confusing old talent trees, long old bg maps, etc., and market it to their current playerbase, rather than just make a classic server. Perhaps the blizzard mgmt would rather just let classic rest in peace rather than raise it and then dismember it in this fashion.

to be clear, I am saying blizzard would be told they have to market classic for their CURRENT playerbase, and tune/prune accordingly. Everyone will kill nef and vael and cthun and KT, and they will do it in LFR within days of it being opened. dungeons will be 15 minute funruns, and who knows what they would do to keep folks from getting lost in brd, stratholme, scholo (old), lbrd/ubrs, etc.

Yeah, I don't care about vanilla, been there did that.

But they have put a lot of work into Legion, so they must care a little, even though I am not happy with the early looks of garrison 2.0.

[Deficineiron]

You are absolutely correct in that. The retail pool for a Classic server being bigger than Nost's population, that is. World of Warcraft had, after all, over a hundred million accounts created for it, between full accounts and trial versions. That is an enormous amount of people who would potentially be interested in Classic servers.

Whether that potential is enough to warrant the creation of said servers, unfortunately, is Blizzard's call. They are very conservative when it comes to applying large amounts of resources to a new project like that (Hearthstone being a serendipitous success story notwithstanding), and there are also philosophical hurdles to get over ("we want to move the game forward", et cetera).

please consider my comment above about blizzard preferring to leave classic untouched rather than get into a situation where they are told that to go with that project, it needs to be modernized and tuned for their current playerbase, which might make very, very good business sense. I can well see how the folks who actually were involved in designing wow or managing blizzard then would rather not go that route.

The more I have thought about it, the more convinced I have become that any 'classic' project from blizzard is going to be something along the frankenstein I postulate above rather than what nost or that other place tried to do.

I will run a poll next month describing a few different degrees of 'modernizing' of a classic servr and which (if any ) players would prefer, and I would bet a large gemignani pizza that 'authentic classic' is going to outvote the other 'yes but with modern features and tuning' type options substantially.

[Thanatoss]

I'd love a poll on this by Blizzard to be honest.

Eh, I could see a poll being taken about as well as anything else blizzard says. Poll disagrees with my position, "Blizzard must have rigged the poll"

[Tackhisis]

That's so stupid.

First, the client has to be rebuilt, as it was written for Windows Millenium and linked with CRT 6. Also, the 1.12 client knows nothing about authenticators and new account structure. The bits of code has to be put out, coding upgraded to CRT 2012, Windows Vista+ support added, new authentication and Warden written in.

Second, the server has to be rebuilt to integrate with new billing/account services, rebuilt with new system libraries and compiler, the code has to be updated too...

That is a ton of work for no result.

[Holtzmann]

Having said that - I don't have any idea how the Nost crowd would react to being monetized. And we'll never know. But it's "fun" to speculate.

I mentioned way earlier in the thread that among F2P games (specifically MMOs), 30% seems to be the cap on conversion between free players and paying players. World of Tanks held that record back in 2011 (about a year after release), but I suspect its numbers have dropped significantly since. I can't seem to find any kind of official statistics from Wargaming on the percentage of premium accounts their games have (which would give us the best equivalent to a WoW subscription).

So... guessing it really hard, the percentage of players from Nost who would subscribe to WoW, statistically, would be between 5 and 30. Pick whichever makes the most compelling case for you. :P

[Charge me Doctor]

Threat was definitely not an irrelevant mechanic. Look at BC tanking , for example. It was highly regarded as being very difficult, mostly attributed to the fact that threat was so difficult to manage. They should also work to improve on the things that would make it irrelevant, instead of removing it outright. I believe the design philosophy of removing things outright, instead of improving on them, ultimately hurt the game more than anything.

Yeah, sure, ask paladins how threat wasn't irrelevant. It was "difficult" to manage only because blizzard fucked it up with paladins being "aoe tanks" and warriors being "boss tanks". The "difficulty" was artificial. It was literally "warriors will not manage aoe tanking better than paladins, and paladins won't have any trouble with it".

I'm not trying to argue that threat wasn't a game mechanic, i'm saying that it was irrelevant mechanic to the point that players simply ignored it and it as well couldn't be mechanic at all (for funsies - many new-somewhat-experienced players had no clue that threat even existed and had no clue why they have to wait for 10 seconds after a pull. If you want a proof - look at amount of hunters with howl on their pets on auto-cast). Just like healers ignored mana management with BiS gear in late WotLK. Just like mages ignore mana management (outside of arcane spec). There are plenty outdated and irrelevant mechanics that should be removed and replaced with better ones (which is finally after 5 fucking years addressed by blizzard).

My point is - threat was non-existent mechanic back then, and it haven't changed much over 10 years. I have no hopes that it will ever be fixed, and i don't think that it needs to be fixed, it only adds unnecessary inconvenience to players. But mobs fixated to *tank role* would be boring as fuck. So. I don't now. As long as tank does his "rotation" right he shouldn't drop any aggro, DPS should be "immune" to aggro (because you want to do max DPS at all time, taking aggro because of your high DPS while tank is doing fine is fucking dumb idea), healers - they can't generate threat that much anymore (since early vanilla iirc when 1:1 heal/threat ration was changed and overheal healing threat was removed too)