Offical response from blizzard on legacy servers.

[Biske]

Ooooh yeah I remember farming in Badlands! I enjoy farming though, I do it to relax while listening to music or podcast or ASMR. Pretty sweet.

What I dislike the most about the Cata changes is how so many of the areas are now in ruins or burning or both. It's a shame. I feared that when I first heard about it. Like, okay, so they're gonna have a molten lava thingy in Ashenvale, that's cool I guess, but are we gonna be able to remove it?? We weren't. And so Ashenvale still burns, from 2010 to 2016 and it's still burning. I don't know who thought that would be a good idea, and I REALLY wish there were some new questlines to remove the worst damage.

Like Loch Modan. Used to be one of my favorite areas, so tranquil, with the beautiful blue lake. Now it's a hot, empty, dirty mess. Can't we fix that? Or Auberdine.

Yeah, I hate the permanent state of destruction in some zones where that shit should have been repaired by now. Also, glad to see I'm not the only one who listens to ASMR stuff while farming lol.

[parcus]

Also, don't forget that Times on older boss fights can't be used as a measure of "difficulty" since there were many attunements that were needed and certain bosses like C'thun and Kael were broken as fuck even by admission of Blizzard due to extreme over-tuning for the current gear.[.

C'thun wasn't broken because of over-tuning, it was bronken because there was bugged.

Anyways, just stopeed here to say: finally Blizzard is actually looking into good alternatives. If they actually make a Pristine server with these conditions: No LFR, LFG, no more than 2 difficulties of the same encounter, and especially no massive nerfs to content throughout the expansion, I may actually give the newer expansions a try.

[Azarak]

I'd love for Blizzard to make a vanilla server just to show people how shitty it would actually be. People are soooo blinded by nostalgia that they don't remember how buggy, unbalanced, boring, and tedious vanilla was. People will play for like a week, maybe a month and then stop; a total and complete waste of time for Blizzard and it takes away from actual new content.

[Super Kami Dende]

C'thun wasn't broken because of over-tuning, it was bronken because there was bugged.

Anyways, just stopeed here to say: finally Blizzard is actually looking into good alternatives. If they actually make a Pristine server with these conditions: No LFR, LFG, no more than 2 difficulties of the same encounter, and especially no massive nerfs to content throughout the expansion, I may actually give the newer expansions a try.

For sure, I think the Pristine Idea is far better than the Legacy server ideas.

Purely from a financial/waste of resource point of view.

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I'd love for Blizzard to make a vanilla server just to show people how shitty it would actually be. People are soooo blinded by nostalgia that they don't remember how buggy, unbalanced, boring, and tedious vanilla was. People will play for like a week, maybe a month and then stop; a total and complete waste of time for Blizzard and it takes away from actual new content.

Could you imagine all the people that play DK or Monk being annoyed they can't play either. Or people that play 60% of the games DPS classes realising they can either Heal or re-roll rogue or Mage.

[Derpleton]

I'd love for Blizzard to make a vanilla server just to show people how shitty it would actually be. People are soooo blinded by nostalgia that they don't remember how buggy, unbalanced, boring, and tedious vanilla was. People will play for like a week, maybe a month and then stop; a total and complete waste of time for Blizzard and it takes away from actual new content.

Ya I'm sure people would think it was shit and quit just like they did with Nostalrius /sarcasm

[Molis]

Love the people hopping in here and saying "Kids in a basement did it, why cant Blizzard"

They had no code.
They emulated.
They had no security.
They were not tied to Battle Net.

Be happy that they are even talking to people that stole their IP and move on.
I wouldn't mind seeing either pristine or classic servers. I would pay and try them, and then quit after a couple months like 75% of the Nos users did.

[ati87]

I wonder how much effort it would take for Blizzard to create 1 server that allows people to experience each tier of a raid as it supposed to, not just gearwise but also specs and balance wise.

[Azarak]

Ya I'm sure people would think it was shit and quit just like they did with Nostalrius /sarcasm

Having a dozen thousand people coming and going =/= millions consistently playing like in live wow.

[Pua]

TL;DR I am all for Pristine realms. People welcome a challenge.

But it WON'T be.

Taking away experience boosts doesn't suddenly make a laughably easy game hard again. All it does is mean that you have to grind through five expansions worth of questing zones that you out-level halfway through, and have done dozens of times before, but with no way of breaking up the grind because looking for a group would be a colossal waste of time.

Just like pristine realms.

As I hinted elsewhere, they achieve none of the objectives that legacy realms achieve. It'd be an exercise in sheer pointlessness.

[Azarak]

The problem with pristine realms is that they are completely unfeasible. Everyone will be on different parts of progression, so you'll spend hours finding a group for dungeons you want, let alone raids. Even if it was vanilla alone, there are like 5 different raiding difficulties and there's dungeons before that that you HAD to progress through diligently and tediously to be even close to geared for raiding.

[Deleted]

Blizzard is totally ABLE to do it.
The open question is : will they ever WANT it ? ^^

Yeah, I don't doubt their ability to do it at all. They could do it if they wanted it. That said, I don't think they will - their communication makes it fairly clear.

As a side note, as many others have said in other threads on the subject, I'm pretty certain that a large part (probably even the large majority) of the legacy server fans are actually more interested in the old DESIGN PHILOSOPHY than actually strictly having Vanilla. I know that I wouldn't care about Vanilla server if retail WoW had a design philosophy straight from 2005. Vanilla servers are just the only way we can be sure to get to play with that design, because Blizzard has shown since late TBC they wanted to do the opposite.
(that's also why the "nostalgia" mantra is especially irritating, it purposedly ignore every criticism of the game to dismiss it as "it's just rose-tinted glasses" ; it's, basically, a strawman)

The design strategy has obviously shifted a lot over the years, for various reasons. I've always been a raider, so I'm reasonably happy with the current strategy - it gets me to end-game very fast and it seems they're producing more regular content for raiders.
Having said that - I can understand how that is annoying if you're not interested in that type of gameplay.

Thing with strategies and design is - they don't often change drastically over night (look at how little design monsters like the iPhone changes over iterations) it took them many years of iteration to get from Vanilla to WoD. I'm sure this recent uproar has them thinking changes towards the other way and I guess the "pristine realm" concept is probably the first step to that direction. People are obviously not happy with it - because it's the first step away from the current "live"-strategy, but we need those steps and iterations to happen. It's never going to just insta-revert to the old way in one huge big bang.

I think that sort of development should be encouraged - to keep the dialogue going and to keep them thinking the game design from other angles. ... and maybe they hit the sweet spot after some iterations.

[JustRob]

Having a dozen thousand people coming and going =/= millions consistently playing like in live wow.

You have no idea what the subscriber numbers look like right now for retail WoW. It hasn't been consistent for a long time, and the fact that they stopped announcing them suggests they expected the subs to drop even more.

Honestly, I'd be surprised if more than two million people played WoW right now. We've been on a content drought for so long, there can't be many people left.

[Evolixe]

In 2008 Blizzard announced that WoW had cost $200million to operate since its release in 2004. This included all costs associated it; staff costs, hardware support, customer service, etc. At present they have around 500 servers, many of which opened with TBC and Wrath, so if we say for argument's sake they had on average 400 servers during this period this would put the cost per server at 125k per annum, obviously the actual cost is much less as there are unrelated costs such as management salaries, development costs in the overall figure.

As you can see from this figure your estimation of 10-15 people just to offer customer support is massively inflated and not representative of the actual costs supporting a WoW server.

Well.. that is why you are waiting 2 (or even far more) hours before your ticket gets answered

And its obviously not 40 people per server. But nobody even suggested that to begin with. Some people just interpreted it that way.
40 people isn't a strange figure for ~6 servers though. And you really need to view the current servers by their linked realms. Individually most of them are pretty dead. So 1 linked bunch of say 3 realms = 1 server.

Now those figures are really quite different

[Aggrophobic]

If you guys didn't want pristine servers, why is the poll 50/50? Now Blizzard will think it's a good idea.

Blizzard is smart. This divides the people that wanted legacy servers.
If they end up not making legacy servers less people will be upset.

Pristine servers are also more likely to be popular with the average player so you know, makes sense in that regard as well.

[Evolixe]

I must say I'm really quite surprised with how many people apparently think pristine servers is a good idea..
The problem with the game is by far not just the levelling speed :/

[parcus]

I must say I'm really quite surprised with how many people apparently think pristine servers is a good idea..
The problem with the game is by far not just the levelling speed :/

To me it is not about leveling, it's also about them nerfing content down throughout expansions, LFR, normal difficulty.

Frankly the leveling experience is a lost case, they'd have to change it dramatically to make it addictive again. Maybe if you could lvl from 1-100 slowly in new azeroth (without repeating the TBC=>WoTLK => cata => panda time and time again) it could be fun.

[Aggrophobic]

The problem with pristine realms is that they are completely unfeasible. Everyone will be on different parts of progression, so you'll spend hours finding a group for dungeons you want, let alone raids. Even if it was vanilla alone, there are like 5 different raiding difficulties and there's dungeons before that that you HAD to progress through diligently and tediously to be even close to geared for raiding.

Thats how vanilla worked though. If you started late, you had little chance of getting into raids unless you had friends willing to carry you for months on end.
At the end of vanilla I remember spending weeks looking for groups to do attunements for one of my alts and I played on a large server.

If you got left behind, there was no catching up. That part of the game was just not available for you.

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They flat out said they're working with the Nost crew to figure out how to make it happen. How the hell do you get no from that?

No, they said they were thinking about a harder version of live as some form of compromise.

[Pann]

Well.. that is why you are waiting 2 (or even far more) hours before your ticket gets answered

And its obviously not 40 people per server. But nobody even suggested that to begin with. Some people just interpreted it that way.
40 people isn't a strange figure for ~6 servers though. And you really need to view the current servers by their linked realms. Individually most of them are pretty dead. So 1 linked bunch of say 3 realms = 1 server.

Now those figures are really quite different

Nowhere in my post did I mention anything about 40 people per server. However this does not change the fact your estimation of the amount of people needed to support a WoW server has no basis in reality. To be quite honest I have read over your post three times now and it simply does not make any sense in relation to what I wrote.

[Zantos]

and there is no doubt that they will have enough players to carry the cost of a few devs.

Highly doubtful. See how the population is decreasing Right now from lack of content? That would basically be the classic server All Year. No new content. They won't stay playing, and thus, wont stay paying and mitigating the cost.

[Akka]

So I will continue to tell you, that a lot of the greatness and joy of Vanilla is peoples nostalgia of it being new and the community it USED to have that we will never see again.

The core gameplay of WoW is leaps and bounds ahead.

I'd love for Blizzard to make a vanilla server just to show people how shitty it would actually be. People are soooo blinded by nostalgia that they don't remember how buggy, unbalanced, boring, and tedious vanilla was. People will play for like a week, maybe a month and then stop; a total and complete waste of time for Blizzard and it takes away from actual new content.

It's just unbelievable how it's possible for some people to mindlessly continue to spam the "IT'S NOSTALGIA DUR DUR LOL *drool*" retarded mantra when the entire situation is about tens to hundred of thousand of people ACTUALLY PLAYING SAID GAME FOR MONTHES.
There is even a noticeable minority of players who DISCOVERED Vanilla on PS (because they started WoW after Vanilla), but still it's supposed somehow to magically be "nostalgia"...
Yeah, you're sure so nostalgic about the game you're... playing for the first time ? Yeah, that must be it !
/facepalm

Can't there be some automatic infraction for cluttering threads with this shit, seriously ?