Should Blizzard release Vanilla servers?

[wombinator04]

No, because vanilla is garbage compared to BC/WotLK/Cata/MoP. Would much rather see any of those than a vanilla server.

[Lilija]

Honestly, this is the only grey area argument that can truly be had about legacy servers. History tell us it works. But history is not World of Warcraft, and World of Warcraft is not a typical mmo. To be fair, I believe it would shatter any numbers from past classic servers - on any MMO - that ever was, but we have no proof of that. What we know is that there is great interest in it - as per Nostalrius and this 900+ page thread - and that old MMOs that release classic servers tend to double their subscribers, but that's it.

There is some interest but in comparission to current WoW accounts not that significant. You need to understand, that only a fraction of Nost players would actually pay for Vanilla server. And the interest among currently subbed players will be minimal: many will check it out but most will go back to Live servers below a month.

And while neither you not me have any data to back up the numbers, Blizzard will have some more knowledge on the topic.

[Selah]

I see two major flaws to your argument. First of all, WoW doesn't have a community anymore. Any soul WoW had is long, long dead. Cataclysm, Pandaland, and Garrisons of Draenor saw to that. Plus, there won't be much fracturing. A lot of people who want legacy servers, such as myself, haven't been WoW subscribers for years. I'm coming up on my 5th anniversary of quitting retail, as a matter of fact. There aren't even any major WoW streamers left aside from Sodapoppin, who, if you haven't noticed, is an ardent supporter of legacy servers, and has made multiple videos pushing for them since Nost's shutdown. It's also not like you have to pay for legacy servers if they're implemented; they'd be their own separate subscription or included with the current retail fee, and legacy servers appearing wouldn't cause you to lose anything you have on live.

Also, what resources? You speak like it'd be an enormous drain on the company. The content and patches are already there. They need only adept them to their current server hardware, bring new servers online, and hire new GMs to maintain them. No actual development is required beyond the adaption phase. Don't forget that Blizzard just devoted resources into a new Diablo 2 patch. They still support a 15-year-old game, so why not give hundreds of thousands of players what they want and implement legacy?

You are not someone to determine if the game has "soul" or not, especially if you haven't played in five years. You can't possibly know because you're not playing the game. You also are not one to determine if people who left the game will come back for legacy servers, if they have unsubbed, or if they are coming back for Legion. You have to pay for the legacy servers somehow, devs, the actual servers, GMs, and any other staff that would be needed to keep them afloat. You have no idea what kind of payment option Blizzard would implement, don't try to lie about that.

It wouldn't be an massive drain, but it would take resources away from developing the live game, thousands of dollars at the very least. Thousands of dollars every month, which would slow dev time for content updates and take from the quality of the game as a whole, the game that is actually being updated and carrying both sets of servers. It wasn't hundreds of thousands of players by the way, there was "hundreds of thousands" registered accounts not active players. The active player count was but a fraction of that, they lost many active players, probably because the game was way out of date and broken.

Still doesn't address the problem of the game being otherwise broken, and I'm still not going to pay to lose content.

[Deleted]

There is some interest but in comparission to current WoW accounts not that significant.

It's very significant, that's why they shut it down. 150k might not sound that much, until you realize that WoW EU likely has less than a million active players today -- and falling. That means that Nost was in the same order of magnitude in size as a WoW region. And Nost was growing.

You need to understand, that only a fraction of Nost players would actually pay for Vanilla server.

And you need to understand that the Nost players are a fraction of the potential customer base for a Vanilla server. It was a hacked together private server, that you couldn't even talk about on forums like mmo-champ. Still they managed to grow to 150k active subs within a year. I have no doubt that if it had been an official Blizzard server, it would've hit millions of subs.

[Canitnerd]

Really? Because I've read innumerable times that Nost could barely make ends meet if at all, and that's just to pay for the server not even dev time or other resources that would be needed for Blizzard to do it.

Because Nost wasn't allowed to charge a single dime for anything. The server costs Nost was having trouble with amounted to a few grand a month, which could be met with less than a thousand subscribers at 15 bucks a month. You'll find its much easier to keep the bills payed when you can actually charge for something instead of begging for donations.

Still doesn't address the other problems either, no content, broken specs, out of date content that everyone knows how to beat, bugs, and so on. What happens when you're geared in full Naxx gear? You're going to unsub because you don't want to run it again, then you'll stay unsubbed because there is never a new update. Not to mention the 8 specs that would be gone, and the other five continents, what about the thousands upon thousands of quests, the 5-mans, the raids, BGs? Why on earth would I pay to lose content? Makes zero sense.

I didn't address any of that because 90% of it isn't a relevant point. Yes vanilla has flaws, but clearly many, many people think that Vanilla is more fun than retail despite those flaws. Saying you wouldn't play it is fine, thats personal taste. But saying that no one would play it because of those issues is silly considering the facts we have available.

And as for running out of content, by progressively releasing a patch every few months (easy to do considering all the content and design is already done) you could string out Vanilla for at least a year, and if the Vanilla servers are looking like a success you can simply give players the option to transfer their Vanilla legacy character to new BC legacy realms and stretch that content out for years and years.

[Selah]

You realize it'd take years to get to full Naxx gear, right? It'll take a month or two to hit level cap, weeks of dungeon grinding to get pre-raid, months of farming each tier before going into the next, months to clear Naxx, and then more months to farm it. Plus, they'd ideally release legacy servers with progressive patches, so there'd be several months between content patches. I played on Nost for 13 months, and I still needed a couple items from BWL. AQ40 wasn't even out, and it'd take my guild months of farming before we had the gear to begin Naxx. And when you're "done" with Vanilla? Play the TBC server. Or, if retail stopped being like Facebook, maybe play there and check out new content.

Also, you seem to forget one thing. Nost was 100% free to play. There were zero incentives to donate. I and many others would gladly pay $15 US/month to play on an official legacy server. Nost's upkeep was in the neighbourhood of a grand a month, which is peanuts compared to how much money people who are otherwise not paying for WoW would give Blizzard.

That's factually incorrect. Assuming the players are dedicated enough to put in a moderate amount of time into leveling and gearing, at most it would take 6 months. The reason it took years in vanilla is because Blizzard had to not only launch the game, but they then had to develop the patches and make the actual content and fights, it was dev time. It'd take about a month, maybe two to hit level cap. From there it's all downhill. Everyone already knows the fights, they know the bugs and abuses. Gearing up to run wouldn't take maybe a month if that, another month to get Naxx on farm status. Still doesn't address the problem of no content, broken gameplay, and losing access to 8 specs, 5 continents, and thousands of quests, 5-mans, raids, mounts, armor and weapon skins, and everything else I'm forgetting.

So if it all it needed was a grand to keep open, and hundreds of thousands of players wanted to keep it open, then why was it having such a hard time staying open? Doesn't make a lot of sense, surely a couple hundred of those people would be decent enough to donate some cash right?

[Zandalarian Paladin]

There is some interest but in comparission to current WoW accounts not that significant. You need to understand, that only a fraction of Nost players would actually pay for Vanilla server. And the interest among currently subbed players will be minimal: many will check it out but most will go back to Live servers below a month.

And while neither you not me have any data to back up the numbers, Blizzard will have some more knowledge on the topic.

I do agree that only part of Nostalrius players would pay for it, but do not forget those who did not go on Nostalrius for several reasons (and pay for the game) not limited to:

• The ethical dilemma of a private server;
• The fear of losing all your progression;
• The principle that it was free made some people afraid of the community;
• The fact that the server was not publicly spoken of. It was the most popular, yes, but it was still not a public entity.

Initially, yes, a lot of players would rush through the servers. This would lead to an initial load of people who would subscribe, but leave very quickly. But since we're speaking of Vanilla here, which had a lot of retention power over the more recent expansions, I believe the community would be healthy in the long run. Add to this a progression system through fairly simple content block in-game and you can have it run for at least two years before it start losing more than it gain.

Also, lets not forget that Nostalrius had over 800k accounts, of which 100k were active. If even a tenth of these were playing on official servers the same way they did on Nostalrius, Blizzard would gather a rough 1 200 000$ the first month from 80k subscribers - assuming the numbers then fall flat to a 10k subscribers without any kind of gradation, they still make more than 1 650 000$ in the following 11 months.

Unless making the servers cost more than 2 850 000$ (which is a very conservative sum), then profits would turn in very fast. For reference, current AAA typical game budget for the whole creation of a game from scratch is roughly 30 to 50 million. If we take smaller games, it's roughly between 3 to 10 million. So if we go as far as to think that Legacy servers would amass a similar amount of players, then we're no longer looking at 2.8m, but 28m in income. This is huge for a port.

And considering we're speaking of a pure programming port, we save a lot of money from the art team, a good portion of gameplay team and, if it is not released with the same timing than say an expansion or patch, we can use the same customer service team. Marketing in itself won't cost nearly as much as other recent release, since it's something that has been requested tremendously by the player base - contrarily to Overwatch, which Blizzard invested massive amount of money in marketing.

Still, it's not free - the first four year of development for the original Warcraft cost over 200 millions. But I strongly believe that considered the reduced amount of work and employees required, the low-marketing cost and the pre-existing interest, it would be successful.

[Robotron]

You are not someone to determine if the game has "soul" or not, especially if you haven't played in five years. You can't possibly know because you're not playing the game. You also are not one to determine if people who left the game will come back for legacy servers, if they have unsubbed, or if they are coming back for Legion. You have to pay for the legacy servers somehow, devs, the actual servers, GMs, and any other staff that would be needed to keep them afloat. You have no idea what kind of payment option Blizzard would implement, don't try to lie about that.

It wouldn't be an massive drain, but it would take resources away from developing the live game, thousands of dollars at the very least. Thousands of dollars every month, which would slow dev time for content updates and take from the quality of the game as a whole, the game that is actually being updated and carrying both sets of servers. It wasn't hundreds of thousands of players by the way, there was "hundreds of thousands" registered accounts not active players. The active player count was but a fraction of that, they lost many active players, probably because the game was way out of date and broken.

Still doesn't address the problem of the game being otherwise broken, and I'm still not going to pay to lose content.

I played into Cataclysm. I saw the game and community's soul dying throughout Wrath and continue to die into Cata. Garrisons have made it worse. I also did have a brief stint with retail recently when I played the trial in order to get the Hearthstone hero from reaching level 20 in WoW. The different was staggering. People hardly spoke to each other. Everyone ran around in their own personal bubbles, killing everything in one hit. You know what? Some of us love the broken aspects of the game. World of Warcraft is a world. Worlds aren't supposed to be perfect. It's the imperfections and how it deals with them that makes it beautiful.

And, just in case you missed this, there were 150,000 active accounts on Nost when it got shut down. Even if only a third of those players resubbed to retail if legacy servers were added, do you know how much money that would bring to Blizzard? $9 million annually. A tiny fraction of that would go to legacy servers. Guess where the rest of that would go? Into the live server dev team, meaning more money, and more content. That's assuming legacy servers only retain a measly 50,000 active subscribers. The choice between legacy and live servers give people more to do and will up the subscriber retention. Bored with one iteration of the game until a new patch comes in? Play the other.

[Eliseus]

Well, if they employ a team completely separate from the current WoW team to deal with Legacy Servers then it would be okeish.

Many people who are against simply don't want current WoW team to use their resources to deal with Legacy Servers.

This is wholeheartedly how I feel. I want a progression type server or whatever it may be that won't alter any work on the current servers. From my personal experience playing games that have these servers, it typically doesn't. If on the other-hand though Blizzard was basically like, "one or the other", then I wouldn't be in such favor of these servers. Luckily, I feel it is safe to assume they won't just disband current wow and is really just fear mongering from the other side that the impact from these servers would be so large current WoW would die.

[Selah]

Because Nost wasn't allowed to charge a single dime for anything. The server costs Nost was having trouble with amounted to a few grand a month, which could be met with less than a thousand subscribers at 15 bucks a month. You'll find its much easier to keep the bills payed when you can actually charge for something instead of begging for donations.

So if it all it needed was a grand to keep open, and hundreds of thousands of players wanted to keep it open, then why was it having such a hard time staying open? Doesn't make a lot of sense, surely a couple hundred of those people would be decent enough to donate some cash right?

I didn't any of that because 90% of it isn't a point. Yes vanilla has flaws, but clearly many, many people think that Vanilla is more fun than retail despite those flaws.

And as for running out of content, by progressively releasing a patch every few months (easy to do considering all the content and design is already done) you could string out Vanilla for at least a year, and if the Vanilla servers are looking like a success you can simply give players the option to transfer their Vanilla legacy character to new BC legacy realms and stretch that content out for years and years.

Poor gameplay isn't a point? The game being broken in many, many respects isn't a point? So what you're saying is that you don't care if the game is terrible and broken, you just want to play vanilla again very badly?

If the content is done, why would you hold them back? More content would be more incentive to play the game, and less dev time.

[Zippoflames]

Hey, its your blinkered view and you're entitled to it. Plenty on reasons have been given as to why it would impact retail but bury your head in the sand to logic.

But until they actually do it we will never know will we, Anyone can give any reason they want but it doesn't mean its true until Blizz do it.

[Canitnerd]

So if it all it needed was a grand to keep open, and hundreds of thousands of players wanted to keep it open, then why was it having such a hard time staying open? Doesn't make a lot of sense, surely a couple hundred of those people would be decent enough to donate some cash right?

When the bills needed to be paid they were paid by donations. Lack of payment isn't what shut the server down.

Poor gameplay isn't a point? The game being broken in many, many respects isn't a point? So what you're saying is that you don't care if the game is terrible and broken, you just want to play vanilla again very badly?

"Poor gameplay" is a subjective thing. You say "broken specs," I say niches that make specs unique instead of just reskins that bring the same thing in different ways. Someone says "sititng around spamming LFG in trade isn't fun," I say that the difficulty of finding groups is what made community so important in Vanilla.

I'm the first to admit Vanilla has its flaws. The rotations are simplistic to say the least, the bosses are mechanically simple and the PVP ranking system amounts to nothing but competitive grinding. Despite that though, I prefer Vanilla to live because the game forced you to become invested in your character and your server community, because it was the only way to get anything done. Disagree? Fine, it's all opinion. I can see where you are coming from if you prefer solo content or don't want to have to deal with people outside your guild/friend group. But at least try and see it from the other side instead of sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling about it being worse.

[Selah]

When the bills needed to be paid they were paid by donations. Lack of payment isn't what shut the server down.

You're right, Blizzard shut down the server. Doesn't explain the lack of donations. Churches survive off of the donations of far less in amount from a much smaller community, and their expenses far exceed that of what Nost did

"Poor gameplay" is a subjective thing. You say "broken specs," I say niches that make specs unique instead of just reskins that bring the same thing in different ways. Someone says "sititng around spamming LFG in trade isn't fun," I say that the difficulty of finding groups is what made community so important in Vanilla.

That's absurd, there were a whole slew of specs that had no place in raids or PvP because they were useless. That's not an acceptable standard for any game, much less one of the most well funded MMOs in history, it's not niche, unique, or fun when you can't bring your shadow priest because the raid wants you to run holy it ruins the experience and serves to only frustrate players.

I'm the first to admit Vanilla has its flaws. The rotations are simplistic to say the least, the bosses are mechanically simple and the PVP ranking system amounts to nothing but competitive grinding. Despite that though, I prefer Vanilla to live because the game forced you to become invested in your character and your server community, because it was the only way to get anything done. Disagree? Fine, it's all opinion. I can see where you are coming from if you prefer solo content or don't want to have to deal with people outside your guild/friend group. But at least try and see it from the other side instead of sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling about it being worse.

No expansion has been perfect. Lets face what the big problem is with WoW, the community isn't nearly as engaging as it use to be. That's the whole problem with Nost being shut down, people are upset because that sense of community is lost. That's a totally fair argument, but instead of pushing for thousands and thousands of dollars to be spent on a product that is a decade out of date and vastly broken, why not give useful feedback to improve the next expansion in ways that are meaningful. I'm not shoving my ears in my fingers, but I played vanilla, I even tried Nost. Both were terrible in a lot of respects and it won't do well in todays market.

[peterpan007]

My thoughts (opinion) - the people who are currently subbed to retail most likely wont want to play vanilla due to quality of life changes in the game and people who left the game years ago who think WOW is now a worse version of its glory self probably would.

And then maybe some who would dable in both - for example play current WOW and play Vanilla until new content in retail comes along

And then there are people who won't play vanilla are also dont want vanilla server to exist so others cant play it - for reasons I'm still unsure of

[Canitnerd]

. That's a totally fair argument, but instead of pushing for thousands and thousands of dollars to be spent on a product that is a decade out of date and vastly broken, why not give useful feedback to improve the next expansion in ways that are meaningful.

Because the measures needed to bring that sense of community back are so extreme that they could never be done. People threw a fit at the removal of the convenience of flying. Imagine the outcry if blizzard announced they were removing LFD, removing some of the raid modes or removing some of the cross server features people have grown to rely on. WoW has moved too far on its current course to be corrected any time soon, which is why people want to turn back the clock and play old servers.

[Lilija]

Also, lets not forget that Nostalrius had over 800k accounts, of which 100k were active. If even a tenth of these were playing on official servers the same way they did on Nostalrius, Blizzard would gather a rough 1 200 000$ the first month from 80k subscribers - assuming the numbers then fall flat to a 10k subscribers without any kind of gradation, they still make more than 1 650 000$ in the following 11 months.

Unless making the servers cost more than 2 850 000$ (which is a very conservative sum), then profits would turn in very fast. For reference, current AAA typical game budget for the whole creation of a game from scratch is roughly 30 to 50 million. If we take smaller games, it's roughly between 3 to 10 million. So if we go as far as to think that Legacy servers would amass a similar amount of players, then we're no longer looking at 2.8m, but 28m in income. This is huge for a port.

And considering we're speaking of a pure programming port, we save a lot of money from the art team, a good portion of gameplay team and, if it is not released with the same timing than say an expansion or patch, we can use the same customer service team. Marketing in itself won't cost nearly as much as other recent release, since it's something that has been requested tremendously by the player base - contrarily to Overwatch, which Blizzard invested massive amount of money in marketing.

Still, it's not free - the first four year of development for the original Warcraft cost over 200 millions. But I strongly believe that considered the reduced amount of work and employees required, the low-marketing cost and the pre-existing interest, it would be successful.

I would say Blizzard is good counting money and actually has the data we don't. If there were money in Legacy Servers, we would get them. I really doubt the reasons for not making these kind of servers isn't just from trying to be mean to Vanilla fans :P

[Meebo]

WoW has moved too far on its current course to be corrected any time soon, which is why people want to turn back the clock and play old servers.

What a cop out, that is just pure laziness.

[Lilija]

It's very significant, that's why they shut it down. 150k might not sound that much, until you realize that WoW EU likely has less than a million active players today -- and falling. That means that Nost was in the same order of magnitude in size as a WoW region. And Nost was growing.

Well, I don't really know why they decided to shut it down... maybe they want to test the ground ^^

And you need to understand that the Nost players are a fraction of the potential customer base for a Vanilla server. It was a hacked together private server, that you couldn't even talk about on forums like mmo-champ. Still they managed to grow to 150k active subs within a year. I have no doubt that if it had been an official Blizzard server, it would've hit millions of subs.

And I thought it was the biggest one Anyway, you can't count on more than 5% of people from private servers actually willing to pay for playing on Vanilla official servers. I really think you are overestimating the popularity of Vanilla. It was broken in many aspects. Only really dedicated people want to play something that is broken by default just for the feelz. You need to realize you are the minority of WoW fans. And while some people who didn't play on private servers to experience Vanilla say they would like to try, the vast majority of them will get bored after short period of time because Vanilla was simply tedious. It doesn't fit current demands of the gaming market (as Wildstar has proven)

[Canitnerd]

What a cop out, that is just pure laziness.

Are you saying that people WOULDN'T throw a huge fit at suddenly not being able to play with the cross realm friends they have been playing with for years now? At suddenly having to manually find groups instead of finding them at the click of a button?

Blizzard has shown they will cave to popular outcry, these convenient but community destroying features could never be removed.

[Canitnerd]

(as Wildstar has proven)

Did you play wildstar? Wildstar has virtually nothing in common with Vanilla wow. The world is a disjointed group of zones you TP'd between, the specialization system has more in common with retail wow than vanilla, the non-raiding PVE endgame is a daily zone just like retail. The raids are sort of vanilla-like in that they were 20/40m and required an attunement, but the actual encounters were all closer to something like HFC than BWL.