Classic World of Warcraft Discussion [Megathread]

[Nehezbegar]

To the ppl that played on Nostalrius You have to add those who dont play on private servers because of shit that happened (loosing all progress etc), i am among them and the amount of ppl like me is huge.

[ls-]

To the ppl that played on Nostalrius You have to add those who dont play on private servers because of shit that happened (loosing all progress etc), i am among them and the amount of ppl like me is huge.

Suuuuuure

[Nehezbegar]

Suuuuuure

Sure. I would love to play official Vanilla servers, but i am a realist and i know Blizz won't fall for it. But who knows, maybe some kind of mirracle will happen....nah...it is impossible.

[Zandalarian Paladin]

Suuuuuure

Actually he's right. A lot of people don't play on private servers because of several issues. Some dislike the community associated with free servers. Some thought it would eventually get closed - and didn't want to lose hundreds of hours. Some just won't do anything that is deemed as illegal by Blizzard, yet would still play legacy servers.

[Tome]

Suuuuuure

It's not rocket science.

[Pieterman]

It's not rocket science.

Do rocket scientists go "It's not basic human psychology"? I wonder...

[Fabinas]

Blizz should just hire the Nost team to run Legacy servers for them.

Make it F2P with a Store (no P2W).

That needs hiring, work, adaptation. Money, Investment. Which Blizzard won't spend/give.

[Tome]

Do rocket scientists go "It's not basic human psychology"? I wonder...

I doubt it.

Because-

They are dealing with rocket science.

[Coconut]

~snip~

Argument 1:

You are assuming people will be bored with Legion quickly. Why not invest in more Legion content/pace Legion better instead of legacy realms? You are also assuming there will be no conflicting patch releases and periods of peaked interest between legacy and standards servers.

Argument 2:

Yeah, no. The "any flavor of ice cream is still ice cream" argument can be used for WoW as a whole if you're gonna use it for legacy. This is an intellectually dishonest position that says listening to community requests should stop once you get what you want. They already said they are only providing services for the latest versions of the game, but you aren't happy with it.

Argument 3:

This is where opportunity cost comes in. Can they do it? Sure. Is it the best way to sink resources into? Not so likely.

Arguments 4 and 5:

I understand why people want to play legacy servers. But at some point they will still get bored with them, because this is the nature of the game.

Card games, RTS games, shooters, table tops etc. are based on short matches with an AI or other people. If the gameplay is good, you can pick them up indefinitely. MMOs are based on long term character progression. At some point you progressed enough and you need a new patch or expansion to keep you playing.

Seasons are a horrible idea. Maybe there is a fringe community who would like seasons in WoW, but the whole point of it for many is to improve their char. There is sunken value in my characters and my account. Achievements, mounts, pets, transmog collections, an identity written in the past of those chars. Do you think I would enjoy farming all my rare mounts again? No. I enjoy having them... and I look forward to new ones.

And what about the time investment? Progression on a single expansion takes 2 years. If you want to progress from vanilla to Legion, a few "seasons" and you're an old man.

Besides, if you truly enjoy repeating the same expansion, you can just stick to private servers, at some point they'll close and you'll need to start fresh. No need for Blizzard to do it.

[Zandalarian Paladin]

Argument 1:

You are assuming people will be bored with Legion quickly. Why not invest in more Legion content/pace Legion better instead of legacy realms? You are also assuming there will be no conflicting patch releases and periods of peaked interest between legacy and standards servers.

Argument 2:

Yeah, no. The "any flavor of ice cream is still ice cream" argument can be used for WoW as a whole if you're gonna use it for legacy. This is an intellectually dishonest position that says listening to community requests should stop once you get what you want. They already said they are only providing services for the latest versions of the game, but you aren't happy with it.

Argument 3:

This is where opportunity cost comes in. Can they do it? Sure. Is it the best way to sink resources into? Not so likely.

Arguments 4 and 5:

I understand why people want to play legacy servers. But at some point they will still get bored with them, because this is the nature of the game.

Card games, RTS games, shooters, table tops etc. are based on short matches with an AI or other people. If the gameplay is good, you can pick them up indefinitely. MMOs are based on long term character progression. At some point you progressed enough and you need a new patch or expansion to keep you playing.

Seasons are a horrible idea. Maybe there is a fringe community who would like seasons in WoW, but the whole point of it for many is to improve their char. There is sunken value in my characters and my account. Achievements, mounts, pets, transmog collections, an identity written in the past of those chars. Do you think I would enjoy farming all my rare mounts again? No. I enjoy having them... and I look forward to new ones.

And what about the time investment? Progression on a single expansion takes 2 years. If you want to progress from vanilla to Legion, a few "seasons" and you're an old man.

Besides, if you truly enjoy repeating the same expansion, you can just stick to private servers, at some point they'll close and you'll need to start fresh. No need for Blizzard to do it.

Argument 1: I agree that assuming that Legion will be bad is really, really far stretched. To be honest, I'm as excited to play Legion than I am for Legacy servers. However, still based on precedent made by Runescape, Everques and the fact that Blizzard aren't utterly stupid, it's easy to push legacy servers patch during content drought on the live servers. There is little conflict between the two - once again, some will play exclusively Legacy, some will play both and some will play exclusively Live. People played other games for years along with World of Warcraft; none ever cannibalized it. This notion needs to go away.

Argument 2: Time change. If Blizzard never changed their mind, we would still have to play every night to be able to raid optimally. We would still have flying - or never have, as a matter of fact. Time change, and so do the market. They have a unique opportunity here.

Argument 3: Once again, if Blizzard only ever developed things for optimal money, we would've never had Hearthstone. Yet, here we are - a game that was supposed to have only a small core topping Twitch every single day.

Argument 4 & 5: I most definitely agree with this. What will happen when all the content has been through? Obviously the servers will gradually lose players. But that's the part where we must open ourselves to other possibilities: while initially releasing more recent expansions will work, at some point there will still need to be something else. Runescape started to develop their own systems; bosses and content unique to that edition, which only get pushed if 75% of all the active players agree. That could be a great way to keep the servers alive after their given "normal" duration. Also understand that legacy servers for Runescape has been a massive success; thus they are able to have a full-time dev team on it.

As for the rest, it's just salt. To assume that everyone who want to play on legacy servers are those who initially played them is a lie you tell yourself and people around. I never played Vanilla - look at the date I subscribed to mmo-champion, for all that matter. I started in 2008, when Wotlk was freshly released. Yet, I'm highly interested with a legacy server.

[Uurdz]

Argument 1:

You are assuming people will be bored with Legion quickly. Why not invest in more Legion content/pace Legion better instead of legacy realms? You are also assuming there will be no conflicting patch releases and periods of peaked interest between legacy and standards servers.

Argument 2:

Yeah, no. The "any flavor of ice cream is still ice cream" argument can be used for WoW as a whole if you're gonna use it for legacy. This is an intellectually dishonest position that says listening to community requests should stop once you get what you want. They already said they are only providing services for the latest versions of the game, but you aren't happy with it.

Argument 3:

This is where opportunity cost comes in. Can they do it? Sure. Is it the best way to sink resources into? Not so likely.

Arguments 4 and 5:

I understand why people want to play legacy servers. But at some point they will still get bored with them, because this is the nature of the game.

Card games, RTS games, shooters, table tops etc. are based on short matches with an AI or other people. If the gameplay is good, you can pick them up indefinitely. MMOs are based on long term character progression. At some point you progressed enough and you need a new patch or expansion to keep you playing.

Seasons are a horrible idea. Maybe there is a fringe community who would like seasons in WoW, but the whole point of it for many is to improve their char. There is sunken value in my characters and my account. Achievements, mounts, pets, transmog collections, an identity written in the past of those chars. Do you think I would enjoy farming all my rare mounts again? No. I enjoy having them... and I look forward to new ones.

And what about the time investment? Progression on a single expansion takes 2 years. If you want to progress from vanilla to Legion, a few "seasons" and you're an old man.

Besides, if you truly enjoy repeating the same expansion, you can just stick to private servers, at some point they'll close and you'll need to start fresh. No need for Blizzard to do it.

1. Im assuming it'll play similar to WoD played, given they've gone downhill since Wrath (my opinion). As i've noted before, the cost to invest in additional new content is much greater than revising existing content. I expect legacy servers to fill the perceived or real content void while also bringing back previous players who don't enjoy the current direction.

Why would their be conflicting patch releases? I'm not expecting the game to get patches beyond simple bug fixes.

2. You're repeating the same mistake. The are entitled to say "no" as many times as they want and I believe you're assuming im pro-legacy for some 'community demand' based reason. I'm not, I think it's an entirely plausible business investment which is why they should do it. Steve Jobs didn't listen to customer feedback because he knew better than his customers. I would take the same approach with Blizzard but listen to what their wallets have said, and re-evaluate the size of the market.

My view is they have underestimated the size of the legacy market and, hurdles aside, will re-assess based on a large subscriber model than previously used.

3. Who knows. It also has a de-risking perspective here, where they manage subscriber numbers in a safer way as them spread the risk over 2 versions of the game. It's not always about getting a good return.

4. "At some point they will get bored with them" sure. Or it could last for 12 years. I'd agree with the long-term character progression but even if they only get 2 years worth of play out of each character the investment may still be sound. The problem with your argument here is that it applies to all games - although I think you're inferring that Retail WoW doesn't suffer this because new content can keep getting pushed out? Yet it's clearly not working for them...

Seasons are a horrible idea? You think only a small minority of people would be attracted to Seasons? You do realise that the entire Diablo 2/3 player base is seasonal right?

The biggest draw for seasons is rerolling and experiencing a fresh new server but perhaps playing a new character. As all players get rolled into non-seasonal its not like you lose that progression but you can encourage new players to join and set interesting and unique challenges.

You forget vanilla doesn't have your precious Achievements, or Mount stores, pet paddock, transmog collections etc.
You're very clearly a pro-retail player and that's fine. I would suggest though that you lack any idea what legacy players ACTUALLY like about the game.

Your last point kind of drives home the issue and that you don't quite understand what a seasonal game looks like.
We don't want private servers, we want official promoted and supported servers. I suspect the anti-legacy crowd are worried that will mean even less investment to the retail version of the game?

[Zandalarian Paladin]

You forget vanilla doesn't have your precious Achievements, or Mount stores, pet paddock, transmog collections etc.
You're very clearly a pro-retail player and that's fine. I would suggest though that you lack any idea what legacy players ACTUALLY like about the game.

Your last point kind of drives home the issue and that you don't quite understand what a seasonal game looks like.
We don't want private servers, we want official promoted and supported servers. I suspect the anti-legacy crowd are worried that will mean even less investment to the retail version of the game?

Yeah I could definitely see how seasons could work in the long term; Basically open a second server, which after a while would merge with the main server and then you'd be able to reopen one once more on that one. That could work, actually.

[AeneasBK]

Yeah I could definitely see how seasons could work in the long term; Basically open a second server, which after a while would merge with the main server and then you'd be able to reopen one once more on that one. That could work, actually.

One of the P.servers I used to play on seems to have written it's own long world questline to celebrate it's 10 year anniversary, which seemed pretty cool. The potential to add "new" content to a Vanilla world isn't zero.

[ls-]

Yeah I could definitely see how seasons could work in the long term; Basically open a second server, which after a while would merge with the main server and then you'd be able to reopen one once more on that one. That could work, actually.

And then people will start bitching again, that blizzard closed vanilla realms and moved to TBC, yeah. If blizz release legacy realms, they'll need to have realms for ALL previous expansions. They'll need to significantly increase dev teams to work on and maintain said realms. Legacy realms will also cannibalise part of retail community. That's not really profitable solution, tbqh.

[Zandalarian Paladin]

And then people will start bitching again, that blizzard closed vanilla realms and moved to TBC, yeah. If blizz release legacy realms, they'll need to have realms for ALL previous expansions. They'll need to significantly increase dev teams to work on and maintain said realms. Legacy realms will also cannibalise part of retail community. That's not really profitable solution, tbqh.

I swear to god if I hear one more time that legacy servers will canibalize the live game I'm going to call in Trump to get in the white house. That is stupid, I've debunked this several time, it's been debunked several time, precedent done in everquest and runescape proved it's absolutely and wholeheartedly not true so this topic is over, done, redone and finished. Legacy will NOT canibalize live.

Blizzard will NOT close vanilla when they release TBC. Why would they even do that?!? They just merge the servers together when the population gets low because they released TBC. So because you need an example, here goes: vanilla have 5 servers at release. When TBC gets released, vanilla merge in two servers while TBC have 5. It's THAT simple.

And yeah, IF legacy is successful, it only make sense that they recruit people to further develop the system. It's normal, like Runescape did. What's so hard to grasp in that?

[Tome]

And then people will start bitching again, that blizzard closed vanilla realms and moved to TBC, yeah. If blizz release legacy realms, they'll need to have realms for ALL previous expansions. They'll need to significantly increase dev teams to work on and maintain said realms. Legacy realms will also cannibalise part of retail community. That's not really profitable solution, tbqh.

There is no need to "maintain" any of those realms since they won't receive any new features.

It can just sit there.

[Kezotar]

This is right. 800k accounts, 150k active monthly players, 13-18k activity peak per day.

That's only on one server. By the looks of it Kronos had about 3K active players. Other servers probably 1K more. So about 20K ACTIVE PLAYERS.

Remember, that's people who play on a free server. But then, let's divide the demographic.
People who play on a VANILLA server are very unlikely to play there because it's "Free".

This could be said about "Retail". But if that's the argument for Vanilla servers having so many players, then you're wrong. Yes, there's maybe a portion that's those typical " FREEE ". But the majority of the players "LEAVE" WoD to play "Vanilla".

So to summarize it up. We have about 20 000 players - That's more than 3-4 WoW Retail servers. In addition to that, these are PLAYERS.
Yes, WoW might have 4M Players as of today. But the majority of those come from "ASIA". I remember Blizzard showing the demographics once, and a big majority of the players came from Asia.

That means, YES, WoW might have under 4M players as of today. However, 2-3M of those from Asia. And they don't even pay a 1/10th of what you pay to play the game.

So saying that each server has about 5K players is absolutely overdoing it. They're lucky to have 2K if they're above High/Full, Low, Medium which consists of most of the servers as of today probably have about 500 players.


Let's do a new test.

Who would play on a private server in the first place? Very few players compared to if it was released by Blizzard. There's a lot of decent current tier private servers with decent scripting. And they're free. But almost EMPTY. Why? I tell you why. Because if BLIZZARD releases the stuff, it has what? Much more reliability, more security, it's also BETTER. Hence why there's more players.

So in short what does that mean? It means that IF Blizzard hosted the server we wouldn't have 20 000 active players, we would have more. Even with the loss of those who wouldn't want to pay.

If you're worried about the demand of Vanilla servers, don't worry. If you're against it, do not even care about them. There's plenty of demand.

- - - Updated - - -

There is no need to "maintain" any of those realms since they won't receive any new features.

It can just sit there.

The problem is that if they release a Vanilla server ;
1. They admit their content is bad.
2. The one server will lead to multiple servers.

[Dormie]

And then people will start bitching again, that blizzard closed vanilla realms and moved to TBC, yeah. If blizz release legacy realms, they'll need to have realms for ALL previous expansions. They'll need to significantly increase dev teams to work on and maintain said realms. Legacy realms will also cannibalise part of retail community. That's not really profitable solution, tbqh.

I think you people are vastly overestimating the cost. I bet they spent 3x on the whole Alliance/Horde motorcycle thing than 5 years of legacy servers would cost.

Also, they don't need to release them all. Not all at once at least. They could release them just like they did originally. And they should only do it after they're done with expansions (which is probably sooner than people expect) to not split the playerbase.

[ls-]

I swear to god if I hear one more time that legacy servers will canibalize the live game I'm going to call in Trump to get in the white house. That is stupid, I've debunked this several time, it's been debunked several time, precedent done in everquest and runescape proved it's absolutely and wholeheartedly not true so this topic is over, done, redone and finished. Legacy will NOT canibalize live.

Blizzard will NOT close vanilla when they release TBC. Why would they even do that?!? They just merge the servers together when the population gets low because they released TBC. So because you need an example, here goes: vanilla have 5 servers at release. When TBC gets released, vanilla merge in two servers while TBC have 5. It's THAT simple.

And yeah, IF legacy is successful, it only make sense that they recruit people to further develop the system. It's normal, like Runescape did. What's so hard to grasp in that?

FFS, Runescape? lel... Good, I'll say it one more time then, cuz I really wanna see Trump as a president of US :3 Legacy servers will eventually cannibalise part of retail community.

[Zandalarian Paladin]

The problem is that if they release a Vanilla server ;
1. They admit their content is bad.
2. The one server will lead to multiple servers.

1. No, not if handled correctly. The content of Legion isn't bad - we won't know until we get to play it. From the alpha, it seems great. The content of WoD is arguably bad, but then again some people loved it. The thing is that if Blizzard is clever, they'll point it out as two distinct products. They don't have to admit anything.
2. Nothing wrong with multiple servers in the long run if the demand is there.

FFS, Runescape? lel... Good, I'll say it one more time then, cuz I really wanna see Trump as a president of US :3 Legacy servers will eventually cannibalise part of retail community.

That's it. #Trump2016 confirmed.

More seriously though, Runescape have more subscribers than World of Warcraft right now, which is really sad when you think about it. But then again, Legacy servers turned out to be much, much bigger and profitable than initially expected.