Include Classic WoW as a version in Caverns of Time

[Pann]

Running an emulator is NOT the same thing that Blizzard would be putting out if they made official Legacy servers. Period. Nost didn't have 1 million subs, even worse people like you will believe whatever numbers they put out because these people are totally legit and have no reason to fudge any sort of numbers right? They had a retention rate of sub 20% on supposedly the GOLDEN ERA of WoW and it was FREE. Think about that. They couldn't even keep people engaged for that long while it was a free game.

Why do you think Nost fudged their numbers? What reason would they have for doing so? There was simply no incentive for them to overstate the number of accounts. It had shut down when the numbers were released and the number of accounts would have most certainly been the basis on which damages would have been awarded against them in any court case.

They had a retention rate of 30% over a seven month period compared to an industry average for free to play games of 20% over 30 days.

[RobertMugabe]

This might be a bad example. But upto the release of CoD infinite warfare the loud majority kept saying how bad IW looked and that CoD 4 Remastered was it's only reason people would buy the game. Now awhile after release on the statistics i've seen, Remastered has a Lot less players than IW. So i see this "We want vanilla" As just a alot of people Screaming, But in the end that version of the game won't have many players at all. So just stop, Vanilla has come and gone, It won't be back, Ever. Atleast not through the official launcher.

Here is one counter example: Runescape OS

[Raelbo]

It's not nostalgia it's {something that is literally defined as nostalgia}!

He's not saying "it's not nostalgia". He's saying "nostalgia isn't a bad thing".

[Vineri]

People trying something out of curiosity are not the people I'm talking about. I tried it, too, to see what it is like. That might hook some people.

But the people pining away for it? The people posting threads saying "bring it back"? Those people are fueled by nostalgia. Again, that's NOT a bad thing! Nostalgia is a great way to get yourself back into something you once loved. It's a reason to experience things again.

I don't think it's fully nostalgia. IMO older versions are the better game, the ones I'd rather play. I guess I'm an RPG fan.

I voted "NO" to the poll, regardless. I think Blizzard would FUBAR an iteration of Classic.

The only proper way to implement prior expansions would be to keep them entirely separate from retail. A really good distance away.

edit:
SIDE NOTE: Do you now wish the Megathread was still open? =D

[Relapses]

He's not saying "it's not nostalgia". He's saying "nostalgia isn't a bad thing".

I understand. My post was sarcasm aimed mostly at pro-Legacy supporters who are easily triggered by the word nostalgia... as if its mere utterance somehow marginalizes their opinions. Oh, and the fact that they don't accept the definition of the word when it's used to describe exactly what they're experiencing.

[RobertMugabe]

Running an emulator is NOT the same thing that Blizzard would be putting out if they made official Legacy servers. Period. Nost didn't have 1 million subs, even worse people like you will believe whatever numbers they put out because these people are totally legit and have no reason to fudge any sort of numbers right? They had a retention rate of sub 20% on supposedly the GOLDEN ERA of WoW and it was FREE. Think about that. They couldn't even keep people engaged for that long while it was a free game.

Another thing people gloss over is that Nost wasn't even around that long in the grand scheme of things. What would have happened when people started maxing out their characters (by the way they would have done it far faster than true Vanilla)? People were going to get bored once they hit the max level and didn't want to dungeon grind or raid grind. So many people talk about the 'journey' that was leveling to max level that lord knows if they'd have stuck around for more.

Those are things Blizz have to consider when making Legacy a reality, will people PAY for it and stick around long enough for it to be worth it? So far the answer seems like: Nope.

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Exactly, as I said it is supposedly the best WoW has ever been, Vanilla. But it had a sub 20% retention rate on a fucking FREE realm. That is pathetic.

First of all, Elysium has currently 4 times the amount of players Nostalrius ever had and more than 60% of all back-then ACTIVE Nostalrius accounts have transferred. The reason this number isn't even higher is because the transfer system worked for 1 week and still not for everyone.

Also, for God's sake, don't be that guy who knows what people enjoy and what not. I think people know themselves what they like.

Oh and also that "FREE" argument doesn't mean anything. There are tons of people who don't play on these private servers, because they are simply not official Blizzard servers (and thus they are scared that they may loose their characters and a lot of other reasons). Also if people want just to play WoW for FREE, they'd play on a Legion private server, not on a vanilla one.

[tankbug]

Only if it didn't affect creation of new content, and I don't think that's plausible

[Akka]

And who's to say those things aren't exactly the reason the game is still around today?

If they saved the game, then fracturing the playerbase wouldn't be a big deal and your argument about how legacy would fracture it is irrelevant too.

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People like Vanilla WoW for what it was, and how it used to be. The community was better, guilds actually meant something, and it was an amazing new world to explore. I don't think you can recreate that experience again, no matter how hard you try.

You can't recreate the "nostalgia" part (memories, first feeling, discovery, etc.).
But you can recreate the design, which is what most pro-legacy people want.

Current WoW could be like that, but the community is far too toxic and the whole concept of guilds and server communities have been gutted.

TL;DR: Vanilla WoW wasn't better, the people/community were better.

Vanilla WoW was better, and having better people/community was part of it, but not all of it.

[Relapses]

If they saved the game, then fracturing the playerbase wouldn't be a big deal and your argument about how legacy would fracture it is irrelevant too.

So intentionally destroying their community is okay because fuck it, they've been doing it all along anyway? This is such an incomprehensibly poor argument I don't even know how to begin dissecting it. Each of the changes you mentioned happened because people wanted them to happen. Blizzard stood to lose more by not creating the QoL features you so revile because if they didn't, their competition would have. There's a very real possibility WoW as we know it would have died with WotLK if not for the changes they made. Further, unlike LFD, LFR and CRZ, Legacy servers cater to an extremely small portion of the playerbase. There's interest, yes, but there's absolutely zero precedent to support this warped ideology that Legacy will somehow "save" the game from itself.

[Kyanion]

Why do you think Nost fudged their numbers? What reason would they have for doing so? There was simply no incentive for them to overstate the number of accounts. It had shut down when the numbers were released and the number of accounts would have most certainly been the basis on which damages would have been awarded against them in any court case.

They had a retention rate of 30% over a seven month period compared to an industry average for free to play games of 20% over 30 days.

Their retention rate was sub 20% based on their 'numbers' And what reason could they have for fudging numbers? Oh gee I don't know to make it look more populated and popular than it might have been?

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Also, for God's sake, don't be that guy who knows what people enjoy and what not. I think people know themselves what they like.

First of all don't discuss private servers so I can't talk about your BS numbers in the first part of your post. Second of all you should do some reading and check out what I said before quoting me and trying to make this comment. I don't care what people do or do not like. What I am saying is that people that want Vanilla WoW make claims about it being the best version of WoW, the one they started playing 12 years ago and want to keep playing. This means they view that version of the game as the Golden Era of WoW. And yet such an amazing version of WoW had a sub 20% retention rate when it was fucking free. Sad.

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Vanilla WoW was better

Haha yeah okay whatever you say.

[Vineri]

So intentionally destroying their community is okay because fuck it, they've been doing it all along anyway? This is such an incomprehensibly poor argument I don't even know how to begin dissecting it. Each of the changes you mentioned happened because people wanted them to happen. Blizzard stood to lose more by not creating the QoL features you so revile because if they didn't, their competition would have. There's a very real possibility WoW as we know it would have died with WotLK if not for the changes they made. Further, unlike LFD, LFR and CRZ, Legacy servers cater to an extremely small portion of the playerbase. There's interest, yes, but there's absolutely zero precedent to support this warped ideology that Legacy will somehow "save" the game from itself.

Current community =/= entire community. 100M played WoW. 2-3% remain, the bulk in China? Of that 2-3%, what percentage of those are founders? These are the hard questions.

The QoL features introduced in the past years seem to tactfully cater to those still playing, not those who already quit. This is the disconnect. Failed features cannot fully justify a success if the majority of those who tried them are long gone, due to their dislike of said QoL features. Apparently, they were not a huge hit with fans.

The biggest push for QoL came at a great cost. The decline during WotLK and the horrific disaster that was Cataclysm. Every expansion thereafter suffered the consequences. Essentially when you nerf a good game, fans vote with their wallets.

[Kyanion]

So intentionally destroying their community is okay because fuck it, they've been doing it all along anyway? This is such an incomprehensibly poor argument I don't even know how to begin dissecting it. Each of the changes you mentioned happened because people wanted them to happen. Blizzard stood to lose more by not creating the QoL features you so revile because if they didn't, their competition would have. There's a very real possibility WoW as we know it would have died with WotLK if not for the changes they made. Further, unlike LFD, LFR and CRZ, Legacy servers cater to an extremely small portion of the playerbase. There's interest, yes, but there's absolutely zero precedent to support this warped ideology that Legacy will somehow "save" the game from itself.

Hell features in Vanilla itself changed after the first year because of games like EQ evolving somewhat and offering more QoL features. WoW didn't magically create some of these things, they saw what other games at the time were doing and put them into their game and made them better.

Akka has the short view that any QoL features Blizz put in ruined the game and caused massive sub losses. He cannot imagine a scenario where Blizz didn't put these changes in and the game possibly dying due to lack of evolution.

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Current community =/= entire community. 100M played WoW. 2-3% remain, the bulk in China? Of that 2-3%, what percentage of those are founders? These are the hard questions.

You do know the 100M number is from Vanilla on right? So this means guess what, people played in Vanilla and stopped in Vanilla as well. The one thing Blizz has NEVER told us is how many people stopped playing in each expansion to get to this 100M figure. All we know is what sub numbers were at in various points of the game. For all we know Vanilla could have had 10mil people buy and try the game and had it drop down to the sub total reported before TBC came out. We don't know.

[Deleted]

Why are people still peddling that lie about "Blizzard not having the source code"?

They revealed during their meeting with Nost that they still have all of the source code for Vanilla. The only thing they have to redo is the build system to get the code up and running. It takes resources, but they don't have to "rebuild Vanilla from the ground up."

They just don't want to.

Of course they have the code. They don't have to rebuild anything either. Any serious development house will have multiple branches of project they are working on and I'm sure Blizzard has a branch for each WoW patch there is. Not having that is really bad example of development process.

[Kyanion]

The QoL features introduced in the past years seem to tactfully cater to those still playing, not those who already quit. This is the disconnect. Failed features cannot fully justify a success if the majority of those who tried them are long gone, due to their dislike of said QoL features. Apparently, they were not a huge hit with fans.

Let me spell this out for you yet again because you never got it in the previous thread. You don't know why people quit playing. PERIOD. You make a huge assumption that people stopped playing because of QoL features. You don't think people just stopped playing because after X amount of months/years playing the same game they wanted something else? Their life got busy? New genres of games came out and people moved to them? Nope of course not. QoL ruined the game! Vineri has spoken!

[Vineri]

Let me spell this out for you yet again because you never got it in the previous thread. You don't know why people quit playing. PERIOD. You make a huge assumption that people stopped playing because of QoL features. You don't think people just stopped playing because after X amount of months/years playing the same game they wanted something else? Their life got busy? New genres of games came out and people moved to them? Nope of course not. QoL ruined the game! Vineri has spoken!

Conversely, you don't know why people started playing. PERIOD.

Did QoL get them to buy a copy of WoW? From your insinuations, it did. Kyanion has spoken!

[Kyanion]

Conversely, you don't know why people started playing. PERIOD.

Did QoL get them to buy a copy of WoW? From your insinuations, it did. Kyanion has spoken!

Ahh of course you miss the point totally. Did I say I know why people started or stopped playing? N O P E. I didn't. YOU are the one making claims about why people stopped playing the game and when you get called on your total bullshit you backpedal so hard I'm surprise you don't injure yourself.

Again. YOU don't know why people started playing or stopped playing the game. I don't know these things either. YOU assume that QoL changes ruined the game.

[RobertMugabe]

First of all don't discuss private servers so I can't talk about your BS numbers in the first part of your post. Second of all you should do some reading and check out what I said before quoting me and trying to make this comment. I don't care what people do or do not like. What I am saying is that people that want Vanilla WoW make claims about it being the best version of WoW, the one they started playing 12 years ago and want to keep playing. This means they view that version of the game as the Golden Era of WoW. And yet such an amazing version of WoW had a sub 20% retention rate when it was fucking free. Sad.

The retention rate of all active accounts was 60% according the Elysium, even though transfers worked for 1 week and even then they were bugged for many.
Second, many if not most players on Elysium have never played vanilla in their life.

Nonetheless, even these retention rates don't mean a lot anyways. Elysium still has 4 times the amount of players of Nostalrius and that is what really counts.

Your posts are BS, dat excuse though "First of all don't discuss private servers so I can't talk.." AYY LMAO, I think you were the one who started talking about Nostalrius here

[Vineri]

Ahh of course you miss the point totally. Did I say I know why people started or stopped playing? N O P E. I didn't. YOU are the one making claims about why people stopped playing the game and when you get called on your total bullshit you backpedal so hard I'm surprise you don't injure yourself.

Again. YOU don't know why people started playing or stopped playing the game. I don't know these things either. YOU assume that QoL changes ruined the game.

By the numbers, they are not objectionably favorable. If you love them subjectively, that is your opinion. The majority of players who tried them no longer play, however.

[Kyanion]

By the numbers, they are not objectionably favorable. If you love them subjectively, that is your opinion. The majority of players who tried them no longer play, however.

As has been said to you many times over by many different people. We don't know why people quit but it is likely due to MANY different reasons. But I'm done talking to a brick wall.

[Vineri]

As has been said to you many times over by many different people. We don't know why people quit but it is likely due to MANY different reasons. But I'm done talking to a brick wall.

It's all one big giant coincidence! G'night mate.