Should Blizzard release Vanilla servers?

[Pylar]

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.

They managed to pay server expenses almost entirely by volunteer donations. They only had to pay out of pocket once, iirc. If we were able to keep the servers up through donation alone, I feel like Blizz can keep the servers up through subscription costs, especially if they just went through the Nost team (which were doing it for free).

My personal view of these servers would be servers that progress from each expansion based on the players, i.e., monthly vote after all content is cleared to advance the server, and it only advances when a majority of currently active players are for it. Alternatively, the players can also vote to "close" the server, snapshotting the progress of individuals and immortalising them (think hardcore death in diablo 3), while maybe even receiving live rewards for their progress (like feats of strength or pets or something).

When a server advances from, say, vanilla to TBC, a new vanilla server is opened up at the start of the raid progression for those who enjoy vanilla. This way, a crowd for a specific expansion can enjoy that expansion over and over again. I can't tell you how it would be best for people who love TBC (since maybe the tbc server advances when the vanilla votes to stay for a bit longer) or the like, but maybe there is a solution there.

Obviously, this is a lot more work than just a simple non-progressive vanilla server, but Blizzard has the option to appeal to a wide audience with Legacy servers. The only actual limitation is how much profit they would make, and that's it.

[Lilija]

Did you play wildstar? Wildstar has virtually nothing in common with Vanilla wow.

I haven't but many of my guildies did during some longer content breaks and they said it felt like Vanilla... and that's why they didn't like it. Mostly because the perspective of getting anywhere within reasonable time was non existant. Basicly a game for people who don't have anything better to do with their lives and have too much free time as their disposal. (my guildies are all working adults mostly with kids)

The world is a disjointed group of zones you TP'd between

Vanilla felt that way with the exception that you flew between zones... but still everything all over the place and felt disjointed.

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.

Given everything before AQ and Naxx was pretty straight forward tank and spank with few exceptions, bosses being more like HFC would be a bit plus because while WoD had flaws, raid design was the best WoW ever had.

[Deleted]

We will need a copy / past feature, to keep our character on vanilla realm and go ahead to TBC, its would be great

Its was nostalrius plan to give opportunity for the player to play TBC and Vanilla.

[Selah]

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.

You don't believe the sense of community can exist while LFD, LFR, and cross server exists? That's incredibly short sighted. Especially since other games exist in today's market with the same or similar features but still has a enormous sense of community. You can't turn back the clock, that's the truth. Even if those servers launched tomorrow and were a perfect copy of vanilla they would still slowly and eventually sink. People will get bored, they will get frustrated, and they'll feel cheated. When it's compared to live and that new feature that just launched, or that new class or raid they've never seen before they will leave. What are they suppose to do with content they cleared 10 years ago and then a second time more recently? They're going to leave. There is no future for a game like that.

[Canitnerd]

Vanilla felt that way with the exception that you flew between zones... but still everything all over the place and felt disjointed.

Have no idea what you are talking about. In vanilla, when you were done with barrens you had to walk your ass to ashenvale to start questing there. In wildstar, when you were done with one zone you would hearth back to the capital, talk to a dude and be teleported to another self contained zone to quest. Thats what I mean by disjointed. It didn't feel like one world, it felt like a bunch of maps connected by a hub.

Given everything before AQ and Naxx was pretty straight forward tank and spank with few exceptions, bosses being more like HFC would be a bit plus because while WoD had flaws, raid design was the best WoW ever had.

Yes, but mechanically complex raids don't work when you require 40 people. Finding 20 people good enough and with similar enough schedules for Mythic raiding is hard, when you have to find 40 people of that skill level and commitment level you are in for an awful time.

[Deleted]

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

I don't think anyone is motivated by spite in this but those who appear to you that way are more likely just defending Blizzards's right to exploit its IP as it sees fit against extreme of people who feel they have a right to play Vanilla WoW.

I won't complain if Blizzard started to offer 'Vanilla' WoW but at the same time they are under no obligation to do so and are completely justified in shutting down infringements of their copyright. It's basically their business decision and, for all we know, someone may have put a proposal to do this. Blizzard will have a development budget and any attempt to resurrect Vanilla would have to compete against other proposals - like new IP/games and you may find the management are generally more interested in moving forward than looking back.

Then there's the issue of what exactly people actually want/mean by 'Vanilla' or 'Classic'. I've seen someone state the consensus is 1.12 but other people seem to want a reboot from the beginning and have that run through to the end of Vanilla, TBC or even WotLK before being reset again. The nostalgia crowd may be more fractured than people have thought about.

Then, as you say, there are all the quality of life improvements like dual-spec rather than 50g/shot re-specs... and my feral druid being excluded from raiding. The absence of flight though is the most perplexing as various people have argued for several years that WoW is unplayable without it and claimed this is the reason for the loss of subs...

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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.

While Nostralis is obviously aimed at nostalgia seekers, people used to play on private servers when Vanilla was live - in fact the first private servers were on-line in wow alpha before WoW had even launched.

So it seems plausible that a significant number of players on these servers do just prefer playing on private servers as much playing on Vanilla.

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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?

Except you're assuming they would release the final patch at once. Read through here and there is an expectation that Blizz would follow original release schedule, possibly accelerated in place where it took too long in the first place.

Nost was trying to play by some unwritten rules for staying under the RADAR. If their server kept a low profile and received no funding then it seemed Blizz would turn a blind eye. The trouble was they got publicity, got much bigger, got more publicity and then took on extra servers they couldn't fund themselves. What did for them in the end was when the players did start paying for the servers (and organising so they could share the load) and when the publicity got too extreme. Then Blizz acted.

[(Insert Name Here)]

...
Here is the list of things they'd need to do:
1 - Locate the oldest code they can find
2 - Rebuild or roll back pieces until it reaches a point where it matches 1.12 (if that is their target)
3 - Weave all security, exploit, and Battle.net code into the old code
4 - Weave in hardware updates and new device drivers into this code
5 - Rebuild the databases and restore missing quests and items from 8 years ago
6 - Find or rebuild the original textures and objects that have long since been upgraded through the years
7 - Playtest, QA test

There is already, right now, this very second, a full existing codebase that has polished out that version of the game. There is no need to restore any code. There is no need to rebuild anything. Right now, this very second, there is a full, working, polished version of 1.12. And this is not just code. This is a working version of vanilla that HAS RUN STABLY WITH 13000+ PEOPLE IN ONE LOCATION ON ONE SERVER. Everything is already in place. The only things they would actually be REQUIRED to do is to negotiate with the team responsible for all that and either recruit the team themselves or use their code and hire their own team to simply keep it going on a daily basis. Furthermore, as that code has been announced to be released for free to the public soon, nothing stops blizzard from using it for free.

The amount who will play the game is far higher than 20k - WoW is not a game with graphics at the heart, and the core points of attraction of vanilla are nostalgia and a completely different style of gameplay. It is NOT the same game as today with worse graphics; the core concept of how things are accomplished in game is completely different (better or worse is a matter of preference), and even retail has shit graphics by industry standards (the actual art style is amazing but objectively speaking graphics are nowhere near the level of other games). Simply put, this is a very low-cost investment for a market that DOES exist.

Now there are problems with this whole thing with regards to breaking the idea of one universal game - potentially causing monetary losses in a very non-linear way, but not a single point quoted is valid here (8 is, hence didn't quote it).

[Deleted]

Have no idea what you are talking about. In vanilla, when you were done with barrens you had to walk your ass to ashenvale to start questing there. In wildstar, when you were done with one zone you would hearth back to the capital, talk to a dude and be teleported to another self contained zone to quest. Thats what I mean by disjointed. It didn't feel like one world, it felt like a bunch of maps connected by a hub.

I have no idea what you're talking about? I've just been playing Wildstar and I walk to the next zone when I'm done to find more missions just like I did in Vanilla.

One thing you did get in Vanilla was quests that went all over the world - sad to see those go, especially the class quests, but in general most people seem to be glad cross-world quests are long gone!

[anon5123]

How is it creepy, lol, its simply stating the fact, that world of warcraft, 10 years ago, was 1000x thye game wow is today. Accept it and move on.

"Accept that my opinion is correct and move on"

haha_oh_wow.jpg

[tankbug]

Not until they can do it in a way that won't eat up a lot of resources. WoW needs more content.

[Lilija]

Have no idea what you are talking about. In vanilla, when you were done with barrens you had to walk your ass to ashenvale to start questing there. In wildstar, when you were done with one zone you would hearth back to the capital, talk to a dude and be teleported to another self contained zone to quest. Thats what I mean by disjointed. It didn't feel like one world, it felt like a bunch of maps connected by a hub.

Vanilla didn't really feel like a world. It were places with some stories that were hardly connected and hardly made any bigger sense. TBC slowly started to changed that and it finally felt like a complete thing since Wrath.

Yes, but mechanically complex raids don't work when you require 40 people. Finding 20 people good enough and with similar enough schedules for Mythic raiding is hard, when you have to find 40 people of that skill level and commitment level you are in for an awful time.

So this is just proving what was wrong with Vanilla. Boring encounters just because you had to carry dead weight.

[Canitnerd]

I have no idea what you're talking about? I've just been playing Wildstar and I walk to the next zone when I'm done to find more missions just like I did in Vanilla.

One thing you did get in Vanilla was quests that went all over the world - sad to see those go, especially the class quests, but in general most people seem to be glad cross-world quests are long gone!

I haven't played since a few months after launch, so maybe it has changed. But I very much remember never walking from zone to zone after level ~20. You did the tutorial, got tp'd to the first zone, got flown to the capital, walked to the second zone, and from there on out it was nothing but teleportation until the very last zone.

Vanilla didn't really feel like a world.

We'll have to agree to disagree on that end. Vanilla felt huge and full of life, I've never seen anyone complain it didn't feel like a world.

So this is just proving what was wrong with Vanilla. Boring encounters just because you had to carry dead weight.

Yup, raiding simplicity was an issue with Vanilla. If I just wanted to raid I would never touch a Vanilla server. My point is that wildstar's issues were not vanilla's issues, they were very, very different games.

[Lilija]

While Nostralis is obviously aimed at nostalgia seekers, people used to play on private servers when Vanilla was live - in fact the first private servers were on-line in wow alpha before WoW had even launched.

So it seems plausible that a significant number of players on these servers do just prefer playing on private servers as much playing on Vanilla.

So basicly what you are saying there were always people who prefered to not pay for the game. Why should Blizzard cater to those who don't want to be their customers?

[Deleted]

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.

Those people who whined at the removal of flying would be the ones still playing retail, not the ones playing vanilla so it doesn't really matter to classic server players.

[Lilija]

We'll have to agree to disagree on that end. Vanilla felt huge and full of life, I've never seen anyone complain it didn't feel like a world.

Lorewise it wasn't. And I don't mean it didn't have lore but that the presentation was poor. And that's why Vanilla felt like a bunch of stories spread all over the place without any bigger reason. It took Blizzard some time until they learned how to make a game that actually tells the story.

Yup, raiding simplicity was an issue with Vanilla. If I just wanted to raid I would never touch a Vanilla server.

I guess now we can see why raiders don't have many fond memories from Vanilla ^^

My point is that wildstar's issues were not vanilla's issues, they were very, very different games.

Sure it's not Vanilla. But it tried to cater to Vanilla fans and there were similarities that showed there were issues with Vanilla and that the market doesn't want this kind of game. Since paying customers that would be interested with Vanilla concept are not that many compared to currently playing community, there is no reason for Blizzard to bother with Vanilla servers.

[Ashkaandi]

Should they? I don't personally care. Will they? No. It's too expensive for the dozens of reasons already covered in dozens of threads dozens of times. No matter how many times you post how soulless you think the game is, how awful you think the game is, and how much better you think classic was, doesn't change the immense cost and time investment that Blizzard simply isn't interested in.

Sorry.

This. How many threads do we need about this before people get the idea? I grew up in classic and I loved it. It's time to move forward not backwards.

[Deleted]

Blizzard will never host a legacy server. The game in its current state is cringe-worthy, but all of the old content that propelled WoW into being the most popular MMORPG is still there. It needs work to be made meaningful and relevant again. WoW reimagined might as well bring the game back to its former glory. Just merge all the existing raids, dungeons, zones, materials, whatever, into a streamlined experience. Right now 99% of the game is reduntant and only serves as a snoozefest to bring the player closer to max level so that they can do the same freaking raid over and over for months.

I'm not saying that every single raid and dungeon should award BiS gear. Implement a scaling system that always scales players down to the content they're currently doing. Make all old raid and dungeons a catch-up mechanic as opposed to trying to squeeze everybody in a zone such as Timeless Isle/Tanaan. Spread meaningful daily quests for players of all levels all around the game world. There's SO much content waiting to be exploited in new ways and yet they attempt to force people into doing a very small part of the game over and over. It takes them a long time to design these overly-epic questlines that nobody gives a fuck about after they've gone through them a single time.

[Varjo410]

Even if I don't care for them I kinda wish they would put up Vanilla servers, just to see the 2 obvious outcomes.
75% of the people claiming they are oh so needed will:
- Start endless rants about how unfair it is they must pay a full sub for an older version of the game.
- End up on illegal private servers anyway because it's free.

[peterpan007]

A vanilla server would cause Mahem - logon queues would be into the hours and I can't imagine Blizzard releasing alot of Vanilla realms

3 million people came back to WOW when the thought of a Draenor expansion may resemble Burning Crusade - imagine those numbers.

[HumbleDuck]

Eventhough I would probably enjoy that, the amount of people this feature would bring does NOT worth fracturing community .