Classic World of Warcraft Discussion [Megathread]

[MoanaLisa]

Can you provide any proof than your hunch that the amount of development time necessary to upkeep Legacy realms wouldn't somehow negatively impact the current version of the game?

There's no proof for much of what people think will be the effects and people are foolish to demand it. The only evidence there is about that is what Chilton has said which was pretty direct. It depends on whether you believe him or not. It's very easy to ignore that and say he's being something other than honest but that would be foolish as well. Every new project of any size affects everything else.

[Relapses]

Why does it bother you so much then? You made it clear you want Blizzard to spend as much time as possible for new content, why get bent out of shape over what other people do in their spare time? If you are convinced they will never spend anything here on a legacy server, then they won't ever be converted to "your" side anyways. So from your standpoint, why care? Why defend Blizzards IP for them, when they do that on their own?

Could it be alarming to your argument, that the ones who pay-to-win actually have expendable cash? Must make you cringe! =D

Look, I honestly don't 100% agree with the reasoning behind Blizzard shutting down Nost but I think allowing it to exist must have created some kind of legal interference which may have ultimately been orchestrated by Activision. I think Nost could have tried taking another route and refused to shut their service down, becoming something like Pirate Bay in terms of anti-copyright activism but they decided to adhere to Blizzard's demands and are instead being rewarded for that by having the opportunity to talk to them directly. I don't know exactly what's going to happen as a result of those talks, but we'll find out in a few weeks.

[Eapoe]

If they paid everything they collected to operate the servers, then how did they make money? Zzzzz.....

How does one illegally play a game that doesn't exist?

To many, myself included, retail WoW is not worth paying for. It's not opinion at that point. It's a reality that many players want the original game they once played, and thus that is why legacy servers are so popular.

If Blizzard is smart, they will jump on this to make their own legacy servers. $15 a month to play on a server that guarantees characters to be saved, on a server that will never be shut down is going to be a humongous fishing lure.

Why do people always make this mistake? Making money is not exclusive to profit or personal gain. They accepted donations (read: made money) off another company's IP. Regardless of how you spin it, they MADE money. Whether they lost money in the long run out of pocket, they still MADE money off of the server.
To many people, including yourself, it is very much OPINION that retail is not worth paying for. Just like it is my OPINION that it is. People wanting Legacy server is indeed a fact and not something disputed, but your opinion that retail is not as good as vanilla regardless of how many people have that same opinion, is just that, an opinion you have. Let's put it this way, you may like the Big Mac as well as 100 other people, I may like the Quarter Pounder as well as 91 other people, that doesn't mean one is better than the other, just statistically more like the Big Mac. Doesn't change they are both high selling items that multiple people like.
The question isn't the lure a Legacy would have, it's whether or not in the long run for Blizz it would be worth doing after costs/implementation/maintaining, and that's something they decide based off their data. Data, which I might add, none of us have access to.

[Everwake]

That is the very definition of an opinion. Some people think retail is worth it, some don't.

And you vastly overestimate the number of people that would be willing to pay for a vanilla server, sorry. It'll be a ghost town within months.

Doubtful. If anything, it would be THE premiere PvP server, as it would not only have the original High Warlord ranking system (thus attracting the hardcores who are bored with Arena), but it would also have Southshore and Stranglethorn as "hot" zones.

[Relapses]

The question isn't the lure a Legacy would have, it's whether or not in the long run for Blizz it would be worth doing after costs/implementation/maintaining, and that's something they decide based off their data. Data, which I might add, none of us have access to.

While we do not have this data we can make generalized observations about the direction gaming is moving. A lot of the high profile, high profit games being released and maintained in today's market focus on quick, smaller dosages of gaming. Smaller time investment for the same rewards. As I've said before, this is the exact opposite of what Vanilla WoW represents: a largely lethargic, almost glacial pace of leveling/end game content. Vanilla WoW is vastly more grind-oriented than present day WoW -- and pretty much every other MMO on the market. I'm not so arrogant to say that Vanilla's WoW appeal is completely moot because of this but I believe this is one of the most damning factors against the implementation of Legacy realms.

[shimerra]

If they paid everything they collected to operate the servers, then how did they make money? Zzzzz.....

How does one illegally play a game that doesn't exist?

To many, myself included, retail WoW is not worth paying for. It's not opinion at that point. It's a reality that many players want the original game they once played, and thus that is why legacy servers are so popular.

If Blizzard is smart, they will jump on this to make their own legacy servers. $15 a month to play on a server that guarantees characters to be saved, on a server that will never be shut down is going to be a humongous fishing lure.

You're confusing making money with making a profit. If I give you money for a sandwhich and all that money goes to paying for the store and the supplies but you never pay yourself a salary you still "made money" you just didn't make a profit to pay yourself or investors with. Same thing for nost. They made" money through donations, they did not it appears make a profit. It's a pretty easy distinction, one you fail to see because they were using that money to provide something you want.


What you state about retail is quite literally an opinion. You've got your head stuck so far up your personal desires you just can't see otherwise and have thus confused your thoughts with the objective reality for everyone else. What is also an opinion is that Legacy server's are the magic money printing factory you say they are. And you're hardly the most biased source considering your desire for legacy servers is quite obviously tainting

[Erolian]

While we do not have this data we can make generalized observations about the direction gaming is moving. A lot of the high profile, high profit games being released and maintained in today's market focus on quick, smaller dosages of gaming. Smaller time investment for the same rewards. As I've said before, this is the exact opposite of what Vanilla WoW represents: a largely lethargic, almost glacial pace of leveling/end game content. Vanilla WoW is vastly more grind-oriented than present day WoW -- and pretty much every other MMO on the market. I'm not so arrogant to say that Vanilla's WoW appeal is completely moot because of this but I believe this is one of the most damning factors against the implementation of Legacy realms.

That honestly should have nothing to do with the implementation of the vanilla servers. The idea would not be to attract new players or the newer generations that create those trends. The entire reason for its existence would be to be the opposite of what today's gaming experience is. To attract players who are interested in that type of gameplay etc. A near identical situation happened with RuneScape. The developers thought it would last roughly six months and put forth almost no resources or team members to maintain the older version that they released. Three years later and the population of the old servers is roughly half of their total gaming population at any given hour and people play the game specifically due to its grindy nature and nostalgia. The market exists even if its not massive by traditional WoW standards and they would be appealing to a MUCH MUCH larger demographic of gamers than Jagex was if they were shooting for old school WoW players. The real question is just if Blizzard is interested and willing to tap into it. Server costs and such should mean nothing in the face of even a very small percentage of their targeted players purchasing access to the game.

[thilicen]

So what did they get out of their meeting with Blizz?

[kenoathcarn]

Honestly I'm sat on the fence about the issue, but Blizzard's responce and some of the defenses of their responce has me quite vexed.

The whole 'can't recreate Vanilla servers' argument is debunked since amateurs with few resources have managed it. Users even say the stablity and customer service is about on par with official servers too, so that argument is out of the window.

As much as i would like to see legacy servers, i have to say the whole "if 30 amateurs can do it, surely blizz can" argument is very inaccurate.

Yeah 30 amateurs ran nost, but don't forget the magnitude of work that went into making mangos (the server emu its based on). it was in development for many many years in the open source community before nost came about.

there's quite a few reasons i can think of that i don't think blizzard would use mangos.

for example:

for those of you that don't know, the way the warden anti-cheat system works, is its sent from the server to the client after you log into the game, this meant that mangos implementations had the potential to do malicious things (im not saying nost ever did this) but the point i'm trying to make was that nost had a far more aggressive anti cheat system then retail vanilla did.

I remember a time when blizzard attempted to have warden scan for other applications outside of just the wow client. and they ran into allot of legal issues with it.

[Relapses]

That honestly should have nothing to do with the implementation of the vanilla servers. The idea would not be to attract new players or the newer generations that create those trends. The entire reason for its existence would be to be the opposite of what today's gaming experience is. To attract players who are interested in that type of gameplay etc. A near identical situation happened with RuneScape. The developers thought it would last roughly six months and put forth almost no resources or team members to maintain the older version that they released. Three years later and the population of the old servers is roughly half of their total gaming population at any given hour and people play the game specifically due to its grindy nature and nostalgia. The market exists even if its not massive by traditional WoW standards and they would be appealing to a MUCH MUCH larger demographic of gamers than Jagex was if they were shooting for old school WoW players. The real question is just if Blizzard is interested and willing to tap into it. Server costs and such should mean nothing in the face of even a very small percentage of their targeted players purchasing access to the game.

I don't think it's fair to compare RuneScape to WoW. RuneScape is a F2P MMO and is its own separate entity. When RS2k7 was released, a lot of people felt like RS itself was already pretty much on its way out the door. You can make arguments that current generation WoW is suffering from the same issue but the fact remains that it's still the #1 paid subscription MMO in the business by a volume of 3-4x its nearest competitor. Regardless, as I've said countless times I still believe there will come a point in WoW's life cycle where Legacy realms will be an option. I just don't think the best time is now and we should at least allow the next expansion to run its course before adding a feature that would take away from current development time.

[Typhoria]

Doubtful. If anything, it would be THE premiere PvP server, as it would not only have the original High Warlord ranking system (thus attracting the hardcores who are bored with Arena), but it would also have Southshore and Stranglethorn as "hot" zones.

Please out of all things, don't glorify the old PvP ranking system.

[Relapses]

Please out of all things, don't glorify the old PvP ranking system.

It required more time spent in BGs than most hardcore raiders spend on the first week of raiding new content. o_o;

[Typhoria]

It required more time spent in BGs than most hardcore raiders spend on the first week of raiding new content. o_o;

It required account sharing and using afk bots.

[Chrno]

I don't think it's fair to compare RuneScape to WoW. RuneScape is a F2P MMO and is its own separate entity. When RS2k7 was released, a lot of people felt like RS itself was already pretty much on its way out the door. You can make arguments that current generation WoW is suffering from the same issue but the fact remains that it's still the #1 paid subscription MMO in the business by a volume of 3-4x its nearest competitor. Regardless, as I've said countless times I still believe there will come a point in WoW's life cycle where Legacy realms will be an option. I just don't think the best time is now and we should at least allow the next expansion to run its course before adding a feature that would take away from current development time.

WoW has been going on it's way out the door ever since mid-WotLK if you ask me personally But this most likely has got to do with the point you started playing the game and wether you agree with all the design changes the game has seen.

I believe adding classic servers would actually keep people subbed throughout content luls and thus making it easier to keep a steady raid team together all year arround. This 'let's play the patch and unsub' has been a real problem for allot of people on the smaller realms. Most people really enjoy the live raiding for cba to stay subbed just for that since outside of raiding they are bored out of their minds ...

[RippedLife]

the only thing that I would really miss and that might even be a dealchanger for me would be no arena..

[Deleted]

WoW has been going on it's way out the door ever since mid-WotLK if you ask me personally But this most likely has got to do with the point you started playing the game and wether you agree with all the design changes the game has seen.

I believe adding classic servers would actually keep people subbed throughout content luls and thus making it easier to keep a steady raid team together all year arround. This 'let's play the patch and unsub' has been a real problem for allot of people on the smaller realms. Most people really enjoy the live raiding for cba to stay subbed just for that since outside of raiding they are bored out of their minds ...

I am playing since mid-vanilla and I was constantly using content droughts to either play other games (while maintaining my WoW sub and checking in now and then), or to do things I was not able to do before (like, soloing old content or farming reputations I have not finished earlier).

I don't have a need for a legacy server. Would that add things to my main account? I don't think so. My characters would not gain any development from this. So it would be a waste of time for me.

[schwarzkopf]

Curious - which patch of Vanilla would people want brought back ? The latest one, or some intermediate one ?

[Relapses]

WoW has been going on it's way out the door ever since mid-WotLK if you ask me personally But this most likely has got to do with the point you started playing the game and wether you agree with all the design changes the game has seen.

I believe adding classic servers would actually keep people subbed throughout content luls and thus making it easier to keep a steady raid team together all year arround. This 'let's play the patch and unsub' has been a real problem for allot of people on the smaller realms. Most people really enjoy the live raiding for cba to stay subbed just for that since outside of raiding they are bored out of their minds ...

I agree with you on this point, but there is the possibility (no matter how remote) Legion will finally deliver on the promise of more raid content. I know it's stupidly optimistic since they've been saying they'd do it since TBC days and they still haven't ever lived up to their end of the bargain, but with Legion perhaps being WoW's last hurrah before its inevitable fade to obscurity, perhaps Blizzard has finally pushed themselves into overdrive on this front.

[kenoathcarn]

Curious - which patch of Vanilla would people want brought back ? The latest one, or some intermediate one ?

they are usually progression servers, i.e start on the latest patch (1.12.1), but content is removed, i.e you cannot do naxx until it is "released" later on

so you would start with ony/mc, then bwl will release later, then zg, then aq20/40, then naxx40

I'm not sure how nost handled the world dragons but i assume it was similar.

[Chrno]

Curious - which patch of Vanilla would people want brought back ? The latest one, or some intermediate one ?

Progression realms if it were up to me, So we get all the patches rolled out at set times known in advance When the final classic patch rolled out it would 'simply' enroll TBC content and a fresh classic server get's released. So we have 1 server per xpac idealy.

edit:
Yes this means if all you want to play is a classic server you'll have to start over. Can't make everyone happy

I agree with you on this point, but there is the possibility (no matter how remote) Legion will finally deliver on the promise of more raid content. I know it's stupidly optimistic since they've been saying they'd do it since TBC days and they still haven't ever lived up to their end of the bargain, but with Legion perhaps being WoW's last hurrah before its inevitable fade to obscurity, perhaps Blizzard has finally pushed themselves into overdrive on this front.

We can only hope this is the case ^^ !