Offical response from blizzard on legacy servers.

[Uurdz]

Well, I tried to show you how it may affect us retail players, but you ended up replying w/ sarcasm lel

K, I'm off. I started repeating myself in these threads, not really productive thing to do.

Yes sorry thought you new that runescape had one this without the doomsday results you fear

[Akka]

It may sound bad, sad or even pathetic, but that's how things are. Blizzard can't win against community, community will never be satisfied.

That's Blizzard own fault for losing in to greed and destroying a game which had a much longer life-span by dumbing it down and making content consumption ridiculously faster.
In fact, this whole shitty new design is the very reason why so many people want legacy realm.
Blizzard gets no sympathy from me here...

Legacy realms are a can of worms. If they open it, there'll be new demands and/or complaints, e.g. legacy is P2P, not F2P, it's wrong patch, it's wrong expansion, add legacy realms for other expansions, it's not as people remember it, it's not as people played it on Nost/PS, fix bugs, etc. And they won't be able to say no to some of those demands, cuz they said "yes" to vanilla legacy, why not TBC, WotLK and other old expansions realms then? If they say no, Blizz will be branded as hypocrites.

Same as above, if there is such amount of demands for non-current WoW, then it just prove they have completely fucked up their own game. It's on them, and it's actually in their own interest to try to alleviate the problem. Because, as much as the anti-legacy people might put their finghers in their ears and sing "LALALALALA I DON'T HEAR YOU" to ignore the fact, the reality is that all these are lost subscriptions for a game which is nosediving into the ground. Unless Legion manages to bring back millions of players for long term (not the spike-and-crash of WoD), Blizzard is simply missing tens of millions bucks of revenue each month due to not offering these services. And sooner or later they'll want to cut their losses and cave in.

If legacy realms turn dead fast, that'll be blizz' failure, and people will start saying that blizz can't deliver a shit, cuz private servers managed to stay alive and relatively popular for years.

There is a big public, there is no reason for legacy servers to turn dead fast. Reminder : a Vanilla server is about 2500 concurrent players (so about five to ten times this amount in active). In the real world where tens of thousands of people play for years on Vanilla PS, I don't see the alternate reality where they can't fill at least one legacy servers which would amount to about 10 to 20 thousands subscribers.

Legacy realms' implementation will also be a confirmation, that they failed to move their project forward and had to go back to previous expansion(s).

That's, IMO, the only real hurdle to legacy servers. It's pointless pride (because everyone knows they failed), but it's pretty symbolic (just like they never closed empty realms and instead worked tirelessly to find alternate methods to pseudo-merge realms without admitting they were merging them). Still, they DID fail and their game IS worse than their previous expansions. That's not really a secret.

And retail will suffer badly. Community segregation will reach new levels, less resources will be devoted to retail, thus less content and even longer content droughts.

There is no community left to segregate, lol. In fact, bringing back community is one of the major reasons to play on legacy/private server, so even more comical to see it used against them.

Making majority of a playerbase suffer cuz of minority isn't right thing to do.

I hate this canned cliché of "we're the majority", especially how it's just empty claims because nobody can know who the majority is. If you want to draw claims of majority from your ass, I can do it too, and actually somehow backed by hard numbers (unlike the gratuitous "we're the majority because I want it very hard and I emptily claim it") :
WoD playerbase is the MINORITY compared to Vanilla playerbase (yeah, sub now : about 5 millions, sub then : more than 7 millions).
Retail playerbase is the TINY MINORITY compared to potential playerbase (from Blizzard itself : 100 MILLIONS different people have played WoW at one time or another ; that means WoD's today players are 19 times less numerous than people who have left the game).

So yeah, don't use "majority vs minority" pseudo-arguments, not only they are stupid but they can very easily blow up in your face.

[Foj]

That's Blizzard own fault for losing in to greed and destroying a game which had a much longer life-span by dumbing it down

Dumbing Vanilla down? How would you do that? That game consisted mostly of pounding your head against the wall until the wall dropped a purple item.

What you people want is a dumb game. That's OK but don't pretend that WoW has become a dumber game over the years. It's become a less grindy game, a fairer game, a bigger game, and a more diverse game.

If you want your small grindy game where 3/4 of the specs roleplay failure, more power to you, but that game's not WoW any more.

[Akka]

Dumbing Vanilla down? How would you do that? That game consisted mostly of pounding your head against the wall until the wall dropped a purple item.

What you people want is a dumb game. That's OK but don't pretend that WoW has become a dumber game over the years. It's become a less grindy game, a fairer game, a bigger game, and a more diverse game.

If you want your small grindy game where 3/4 of the specs roleplay failure, more power to you, but that game's not WoW any more.

1/10, too obvious.

[MoanaLisa]

Now I agree that there may be *some* people that want it, but based off of the fact that nobody has asked for this, I can't imagine the number is too high. People have bluntly been asking for legacy servers because they find them to be fun and retail has been awful for a long time. I mean who really looked at that solution and said "THIS IS THE PERFECT IDEA!"??? There's not enough fixes that blizzard could perform where it would be feasible - people want to play in Azeroth, not he Broken Isles, for example. They don't want homogenized classes, they like having distinct classes that have advantages and disadvantages.

Let's take all what these pristine realms are going to offer and see if anyone has asked for any of it. OK?

• Leveling acceleration: I've seen lots of threads where people say that leveling is too quick. People have different opinions of course but people have certainly complained about leveling out of zones before they are half done. As far as I know they haven't specifically said that quest and objective XP would be lowered but I certainly would like that as would others.
• Heirloom gear: People have certainly complained about being in groups with those who are fully decked out in heirloom gear. So yes, that's been asked for. Much slower leveling as well.
• Character transfers: Plenty of people think that character transfers destroyed early realm communities. No problem there. Requested many times.
• Character boosts: Boosts have become a fairly normal thing but there are still plenty of people who think they are pay-to-win and that they encourage bad play since learning a bit about your class as you level is non-existent. So yes, people have asked for boosts to be removed.
• WoW Token: Same as character boosts; lots of people think they are pay-to-win and would like to see them removed.
• Recruit-A-Friend bonus: Can't say that I've seen much of anyone complaining about RAF in the last few years. So removing that might qualify as something no one asked for.
• CRZ: Many people still go on about CRZ. So enough about that. There's a lot of people asking for that to be gone.
• Group Finder: Right up there with many as one of the primary reasons, if not the reason, why the game has lost a sense of community. Ridiculous to say that no one has asked for that. Realm reputation will matter again. No LFR.

Granted that the proposed realm type is not a vanilla realm but Blizzard never said it was in the first place. And it's clear that much of what they are removing is indeed stuff that people have wished was gone due to the effects that it's had on 'community'.

Fact is the game is better when there is a community, and while what they are proposing isn't what you want, if the things they have removed lead to a greater sense of being in a realm community that's going to be a win for the players there. Because it's just better to have that than not to have it at all.

So I wouldn't be too quick to dismiss it simply because Blizzard didn't meet your demands. And again, a great deal of what they want to change are things that many have wanted changed. People should step back a bit and just look at the proposal on its own merits rather than continue to stew that their personal vision isn't to be realized. Especially since I'm guessing that you have asked for a lot of this yourself at one time or another.

[rda]

^^ Nothing except no CRZ and no LFG/LFR affects gameplay. Leveling is still very quick, it doesn't matter whether some other guy you are looking at did it with heirlooms or used RAF one bit, you wouldn't feel the difference.

The effect of no CRZ is perhaps positive, people meet same people in the zones.

The effect of no LFG/LFR is a mixed bag, on one hand it's tighter community again, on the other hand it's undoubtedly going to take more time to get a group and the community has to reach a certain critical mass for it to work at all (that likely means no groups for leveling instances, because, again, leveling is fast).

I don't think these pristine servers can work.

[Deleted]

Granted that the proposed realm type is not a vanilla realm

Exactly. This so typical of the current dev team. It's the same story as with player housing: "We heard you, you want player housing! But we're going to do it the Blizzard Way™!" And that's how we got garrisons.

[Uurdz]

Exactly. This so typical of the current dev team. It's the same story as with player housing: "We heard you, you want player housing! But we're going to do it the Blizzard Way™!" And that's how we got garrisons.

It's no just the quests too, it's the gear progression and talent trees that I miss most

[Charge me Doctor]

It's no just the quests too, it's the gear progression and talent trees that I miss most

You get talent trees back in legion tho

[Chrno]

I honestly doubt a pristine realm is what players are looking for.
Most people i talked to about this subject (guildies, friends) would be interested to play on a classic realm to experience a game they never played (they started during TBC or WotLK). A Pristine realm is just the same game as live but without the stuff that ''killed off'' the server cummunity.

- People are intersted in the leveling experience to see how bad/good it really was.
- To play dungeons like BRD / scholomance and do the 40min baronrun in stratholme.
- To see what it was REALLY like to play a 40man raid.
- Maybe even try out pvp ....

Allot of people would really enjoy to see what it was actually like back then. And tbh, at times where you have content droughts that take over a year as we do now it would be really cool to actually level up a character.

A pristine realm (even tho it does some cool things) is just the same game we have on live.

TL;DR: It sounds like a realm i would enjoy playing on but it's not worth abandoning my guild / friends for since it's the same game at the end.

[Akka]

You get talent trees back in legion tho

That's about as close to real talent trees as the "pristine" realms are to legacy ones.
And just like the evocation of pristine realms are a half-voiced admission that their new game design is shitty, their reintroduction of bastardized talent trees is an admission that their new talent design is shitty (though I recognize that at least, the new talent design came from a good idea).

[Deleted]

I honestly doubt a pristine realm is what players are looking for.

It isn't, but making legacy realms would be admitting that the old design is better than the new one, especially if they become more popular than the current version. The current dev team is obviously going to resist doing things that would highlight their own failures.

[Deleted]

Why? I've seen nothing but "hate" towards anyone against legacy servers from everyone pro-legacy servers. I guess it's those alpha-male tendencies popping up in you guys again, huh?

Blizzard has once again said: "We've looked at it, and it is too time consuming, and too expensive to do." So, the answer is still no, and the legacy server community is once again frothing at the mouth because of what they offered as a compromise. It's over, you lost (at least for 3-5 more years until WoW is done.) Get over it and move on.

We won.

THe guy that said that blizzard wont even bother about the petition

THe hate you have is so disturbing

Spit more toxicity and hate because you didnt won nothing .

Still mad because you dont have fun in your game and people having fun on private servers

[Self Inflicted Wounds]

You are just circling trough your failed arguments that didn't disprove anything of relevance yet, not discussing anything, now don't try to change the argument you failed to counter just because your responses made no sense. Go then circle to the responses debunking them too if you want to act ignorant and don't expect to be taken serious anymore. You know where they are.

When you have something of substance to say, get back to me.

- - - Updated - - -

Compare the amount of players that Nostalrius had to the amount of players that the WoD private servers have.

/thread

Do you have those numbers?

[Deleted]

- People are intersted in the leveling experience to see how bad/good it really was.
- To play dungeons like BRD / scholomance and do the 40min baronrun in stratholme.
- To see what it was REALLY like to play a 40man raid.
- Maybe even try out pvp ....

My 2 cents about this subject (legacy VS pristine)
I agree they are two different things, and i have to say i am not at all interested in any of them.
Pristine servers might acomplish to bring back some community for some time, and after that the few ones that remained there would be even worse than people who are nowadays in a dead realm, they would be much more isolated.
Legacy servers; I could be okay with wow going back to some core designs vanilla had, i am totally up for a total rework of the leveling, which i think it is at the moment bland and boring as hell, but sure as hell not in the same zones, against the same mobs and in the same dungeons and raids i have already seen, and just the thought of 40 man raids coming back, when we are more or less all welcoming the new legion 5-man raiding, sounds at least awkward.
So i could be ok with SOME of the core designs of vanilla being back, but only in the current game and forward.

[Vaelorian]

A pristine realm is nothing like what people want. Sure all proposed is nice. But without the need to group up (as everything is so easy) it still won't work. How thick can you get Blizzard?

Either provide what we want. Or don't. Not some middle way and then when it fails, tell us: We told you so!

[Echo of Soul]

I honestly doubt a pristine realm is what players are looking for.

I doubt it's what the nostalrius and legacy realm crowd is looking for but it might be something the live community needs if they continue to refine the idea and built on it.

[Akka]

When you have something of substance to say, get back to me.

Oh the irony

[Chrno]

My 2 cents about this subject (legacy VS pristine)
I agree they are two different things, and i have to say i am not at all interested in any of them.
Pristine servers might acomplish to bring back some community for some time, and after that the few ones that remained there would be even worse than people who are nowadays in a dead realm, they would be much more isolated.
Legacy servers; I could be okay with wow going back to some core designs vanilla had, i am totally up for a total rework of the leveling, which i think it is at the moment bland and boring as hell, but sure as hell not in the same zones, against the same mobs and in the same dungeons and raids i have already seen, and just the thought of 40 man raids coming back, when we are more or less all welcoming the new legion 5-man raiding, sounds at least awkward.
So i could be ok with SOME of the core designs of vanilla being back, but only in the current game and forward.

The bolded part is kind of the problem we have these days. Not everyone is welcoming all these changes. The game has changed every expansion casusing the WoW community to split in multiple groups who all have their own idea's about the game and how it should be designed.

People have been seeing the game moving away from what they like for years now. And that's most likely whats causing the massive outcry. It's not really about what we think is right and how we think this game is supposed to be played. I believe it's about letting people choose for themselves. If setting up progression servers is even remotely possible i believe blizzard should let people decide for themselves what they want to play. Most might actually play both.

[Aehl]

We explored options for developing classic servers and none could be executed without great difficulty. If we could push a button and all of this would be created, we would. However, there are tremendous operational challenges to integrating classic servers, not to mention the ongoing support of multiple live versions for every aspect of WoW.

Translation: Too expensive, too,much work for almost no return.

Which is exactly what they said previously.

In short: No.