People that say 'classic will nosedive after a few months'

[Akka]

Why are you calling me names for quoting someone else's numbers?

I'm calling you names for not understanding the numbers you quote means, not for quoting them. Hiding behind "what I say is true if we take this completely out of context" is a pretty bad cop-out.

All I'm saying is that "~20k people spread on the different private servers playing daily" won't produce 500k players for classic.

As I said, it's not "spread over different private servers", it's "on a single private server", it means about 100-150k actual players, and that's still on a single server.
As I pointed, you need to add all the other people from other pservers, all the people who are interested but don't play on pservers, all people who are on today's retail but might be interested, and substract from this the people who would only play because it's free (which is not that big a number).

---

I did quote 'casual' players, you saw that right? And then your answer is: "they didn't". Those are the people for whom it took over a year to reach lvl 60 and those are that VAST majority of players who never even saw level 60.

The vast majority of people playing WoW was "casual" at the time too, and yes of course they did, my answer was never "they didn't". They might have taken some time to reach level 60, but this didn't prevent them to do dungeon. It just wasn't a mindless 20mn rush after clicking a button (and this is precisely why it might have been worth it at the time).

'we' being the tiny, TINY minority of vanilla players that reach level 60

That's just a massive exagerration. A lot of people might not reach 60, maybe even a majority, but claiming only a tiny minority does is ridiculous.

Kind proves the point doesn't it? Vanilla wow has been free to play for years now and still it doesn't attract more than a fraction of what pay to play wow does.

Not really. It proves that there is tens to hundreds of thousand of people who go out of their way to play Vanilla, and they still play it years after years. Also a LOT more people won't touche pservers even if free, because they are mostly unknown, illegal and buggy. *I* have been an "old school WoW" fan since the beginning, I'm computer literate, I keep myself informed, and even then I only started to play on pservers maybe three years ago.

[kamuimac]

Does the same not happen with the current retail version?

Classic will always have plenty of players.

There will always be players; I would imagine at least a similar number to the current WoW.

mate classic will nosedive after 2 weeks once people realise how painfull leveling is.

[Daffan]

it will nose dive within a few days not months

lol at the kids who never played the original wow

Classic has problems But retail is so much better right, don't they give you free 900ilvl and skip you over 90% of the content when reaching 110 now? lel

[Deleted]

Classic has the potential to hold player numbers longer than current, the journey lasts longer before you even get to "end game"

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And people said the same for wotlk, and cata and panda land, all the while sub numbers dropped and vanilla private servers got a lot of attention...gee, i wonder why?

Well no. People left the game for many reasons, again the primary reason from polls and blizzard own data is lack of time to play usually die to family. No one gave a shit about a few hundred k hipster on a private server, till you decended on the forums to bitch and moan cos blizz closed your server.

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Classic has problems But retail is so much better right, don't they give you free 900ilvl and skip you over 90% of the content when reaching 110 now? lel

Yes and thank god for it if I had to grind my artifact again I'd have quit instead of rerolled from my warrior when I got tiered of the bus nurf roller coaster

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Pls someone make archive of these threads, I will ask them in a few years to humor myself when I lack material.

Well now that I am thinking, will I ever lack material tough?

They will be a big I told you so to sit next to the "why is classic server so empty" and "blizz needs to improve classic to attract players" threads

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I said daily, which means there are many more, that simply dont log daily, nostralius proved that by having according to the latest reading 250k active accounts for a period of a few months which is why it got so much attention and legally targeted by Blizzard, too many players bro.

Of course some cant afford it, i know those wont play, all i am talking about is the "Tourist mentality" someone else mentioned.

Many people will check it out, most will disappear in less than a few months, giving it up to 6 months, depending how they do their patch cycle.

But the private servers community, spread out all different expansions is much more than "20k daily", which is what i am pointing at.

WoW has around to 6mil active accounts at the moment, they arent all logging on at the same time/day, private servers arent any different, there can be around to as example Lights Hope now, 30k active players, while around 10k log on daily.

I am not claiming some insane number, anywhere between 500k to 2mil people at launch, 2mil is being really open about it but why not, which will die down to a few thousands, probably around anywhere 10-100k after the first few months, depending on the patch cycle.

If they do patch cycles of the original content then it will last longer.

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I dont categorize every player the same, the average terrible mouthbreather doesnt count as a player for me.

Just because most will be terrible bads, doesnt mean the better players will take as long as it took us 12 years ago to learn things, everything is already known, there is nothing to discover.

As example, farming dungeons for a tank (Warrior) is retarded when the craftable gear is miles better, the Enchanted Thorium gear as example, took me like 2 days to farm all 3 pieces in July-August 2005, and that was because we rerolled from Alliance to Horde so we restarted at June 2005 despite clearing most of MC as alliance cause we had EQ raiders leadership that knew how the game worked, and by then, 5 months after release i knew how the game worked too, thats why i only mined for a week, crafted my gear, made an easy 1k gold, bought my mount, made another 2k over the next month, by arcane crystals only (Long live the Enh Shamans basically) etc etc.

Game was easy if you had the knowledge, which by now, 12 years after, that knowledge is really easy to find.

It's almost like it was made to easier then the outher mmos on the market. Oh wait it was.


People forget one of the big complaints in vanilla was about how easy it was compared to ever quest

[Meiffert]

I'm calling you names for not understanding the numbers you quote means, not for quoting them. Hiding behind "what I say is true if we take this completely out of context" is a pretty bad cop-out.

As I said, it's not "spread over different private servers", it's "on a single private server", it means about 100-150k actual players, and that's still on a single server.

Ok, let me quote the same thing again, because one of us is reading it wrong:

as i already mentioned, there is a good crowd of up to ~20k people spread on the different private servers

These numbers might be completely wrong, way under-represented, or, as it turns out was the case, the author meant something slightly different.
I asked about that specifically, because it didn't make sense to me and I got an answer which was perfectly satisfactory.

As I pointed, you need to add all the other people from other pservers, all the people who are interested but don't play on pservers, all people who are on today's retail but might be interested, and substract from this the people who would only play because it's free (which is not that big a number).

I do, in fact, not need to do that, because those players are not relevant to my question.
People coming from retail or simply returning to the game etc. were counted separately to the total, I only inquired about one specific sub-group of players coming from private servers.

[Eurhetemec]

But for how long? Are you gonna get a decade out of nax

For like 1-6 months in most cases, I would say. I'm not saying it won't nosedive, that's other people.

I'm just saying there's no need for "alternative explanations".

I think you underestimate the power of a wife and kids, its hard enough organised a pub crawl, a cricket team or the weeknight 5 a side football team with needing a wife pass / babie sitter/ time off work e.t.c

now try excusing sitting down for hrs and hrs leveling at the computer.

It's not that different from any other game until you get to raiding and the like. I'm married, I'm 39, we don't have kids, but most of my friends are and do, and some of them manage to log hundreds of hours in games without angering the spouse. So I think they could enjoy Classic for pretty much the whole "leveling" period. Which at their rate could be a very long time, but I'd guess they'd get 1-6 months out of it. Most of them are so well-off that they wouldn't even blink at the subscription.

If your spouse is less understanding about WoW or other games than five-a-side football or pub crawls (you a fellow Brit lol?), then you have a communications/values issue within your family. Which does happen!

The big problem with modern WoW for a lot of my friends is that they perceive it as having become this hardcore endgame-focused deal, not the fun leveling game they remember. Most of them never made it to 60, or didn't do so until later expansions. My own brother played most of the WoW expansions, but tended to quit once he hit max level.

You realize that most "former players" have moved on, some maybe don't even own a computer, some dumped gaming completely, some simply found a new games and don't want to spend the time they could spend in their favorite game to play some hyped up shit. Or, you know, some people literally don't have a time in their 8h work, 8h sleep, 6h family, 2h hobby daily routine.

Uh-huh. Clearly I could never have thought of any of this... /rolleyes.

C'mon dude. Obviously a lot of this applies, but if you don't think nostalgia is a powerful force, for good or ill, you're very silly. 2h hobby daily is pretty much exactly where WoW used to sit for a lot of people - you seem to think we're talking exclusively about people who were playing Vanilla 6+ hrs per day or something. I'm not. I'm talking about the much wider variety of people who played Vanilla and TBC, which gradually narrowed down to a more male (though still not as male as some people think it is), younger (but not as young as it used to be) audience as WoW focused harder and harder on mechanics and making the game more of a game and less of an RPG (which I don't think we was a bad thing, per se, to be clear).

Sure, a lot of people won't have time to actually play, but will they want to check it out? I think a very large number will. Last I heard, WoW had sold something like 100m copies. Most of those people have quit, and won't come back for Classic. But if, say, 5% did? That's 5 million people, dude. If they stayed for even an average of 3 months, that's an insane amount of money.

[Torais]

It's amazing that we don't consider 5-7 mil subs to be successful anymore for WoW. It's still more than any other MMORPG has ever enjoyed. That's massive revenue, not to mention the money spent in the store and on services.

You are not taking overhead in to account. All that bandwidth, hardware, storage, support, etc. cost big money and that is before considering the cost of continued game development.

[McFuu]

You are not taking overhead in to account. All that bandwidth, hardware, storage, support, etc. cost big money and that is before considering the cost of continued game development.

I have taken that into account. I'd have a hard time believing that blizzard wouldn't have a plan for reducing costs of steady subs dropped. Even the low number of 5 mil subs, you are looking at a 75 million a month revenue stream. Not to mention services and digital goods.
Regardless of the money that gets made, WoW is Blizzards halo brand. It's their most visible game and it's the game the vast majority of their fans were introduced to Blizzard through. Blizzard will not allow the game to fade into obscurity because it's so high profile. It's quite possible they have plans to operate at a loss for xx so many years before they would even start a end of life cycle plan.

[Charge me Doctor]

And people said the same for wotlk, and cata and panda land, all the while sub numbers dropped and vanilla private servers got a lot of attention...gee, i wonder why?

Sub numbers only grew up to WotLK, then content drought kicked in and people realized that you can unsub from the game when you are bored, kinda that's why blizzard stopped showing sub numbers, they are kinda irrelevant at this point.

And private servers get attention because: nostalgia (short term), free (long term), "outlaw" (long term), exploitable (short term), "everything starts again and i can beat everyone!" (short term). And yeah, because people want to play 1.12 again. Or just play 1.12 for their first time

[Vargulf the Happy Husky]

classic is going to blow

the only people that will stick around are the people that played it in 04. most everyone else will come back to live when they realize their epeen is tinier than the guys do mythics in BfA.


40 MAN RAIDS WAAAHOOOOOOOO

[Charge me Doctor]

Uh-huh. Clearly I could never have thought of any of this... /rolleyes.

C'mon dude. Obviously a lot of this applies, but if you don't think nostalgia is a powerful force, for good or ill, you're very silly. 2h hobby daily is pretty much exactly where WoW used to sit for a lot of people - you seem to think we're talking exclusively about people who were playing Vanilla 6+ hrs per day or something. I'm not. I'm talking about the much wider variety of people who played Vanilla and TBC, which gradually narrowed down to a more male (though still not as male as some people think it is), younger (but not as young as it used to be) audience as WoW focused harder and harder on mechanics and making the game more of a game and less of an RPG (which I don't think we was a bad thing, per se, to be clear).

Sure, a lot of people won't have time to actually play, but will they want to check it out? I think a very large number will. Last I heard, WoW had sold something like 100m copies. Most of those people have quit, and won't come back for Classic. But if, say, 5% did? That's 5 million people, dude. If they stayed for even an average of 3 months, that's an insane amount of money.

Sorry but anyone who played 2 hours per day in vanilla probably leveled in years and never actually played the game.

Yeah, they will check it out, that's where major part of private server popularity comes from - people check it out and leave at level 40. Or level to 60 and realize that there is only one horde pve guild and he is not welcome here, because "we are full on rogues" and he just quits.

Imaginary numbers are not a good argument by the way. I sincerely doubt that even 5% of people will buy the game again just to "check it out". A lot of people quit the game for a reason, and reason not being "it's not vanilla wow anymore". If anything, it's more possible that people will return for WotLK-style WoW, because that's where the subscription peak was

[HordeFanboy]

Your signature fully expresses your bias. Classic will be successful, but it will remain a very large minority of the playerbase (10% of the playerbase would be a very generous estimate, it will probably be far less). That you think it will have 3-4x more players on it is comical.

Unless they take vanilla and add content so that it is a new game (a 100% impossibility), a server with no new content is going to leave players bored and moving on over time. It will never be popular, but it will be played. Sorry.

Ppl will love vanilla because vanilla is an mmorpg. Retail feels like single player game. Thats why vanilla will have more players than bfa.

[pateuvasiliu]

I seriously doubt there are going to be that many that will drop live completely and go to classic, two totally different games with totally different expectations.

They don't have to drop it, just play Classic over BfA at launch.

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millions of former WoW players .... your asuming alot here.

1. wow hit max subs in wotlk not in vanilla, current subs are still grater than vanilla was.
2. the wow player base still has a sizeable chunk of those original players who still progress there main chars (me)
3. you assume they quit because they stopped liking the game, in reality polls have shown most quit due to time issues (we grew up we have kids and jobs now)
4. your clearly letting your emotions on the issue bias your judgment which makes taking anything you say seriously difficult.

millions of former wow players are gonna look at it and go .... meh i dont have time for that any more.

1. Wrong. Vanilla had 7.5 M at its peak, the last release was 5M.

2. No it's not. With 7.5 M in Vanilla and 12 M in WOTLK it's pretty obvious the 5M Legion has are not the same players that played back then.

3. Sure some quit because of that, doesn't mean they won't try Classic again for nostalgia's sake or getting back together with their old guilds. Having a kid doesn't mean you don't have time to do what you like.

4. You don't need to take anything I say in any way, just wait for the numbers and send me a nice PM saying " Woah you were right ".

millions of former wow players are gonna look at it and go .... meh i dont have time for that any more.

And millions out of the dozens of millions that played WoW are going to fall in love with WoW again and play it.

[Swalload]

Does the same not happen with the current retail version?

Classic will always have plenty of players.

There will always be players; I would imagine at least a similar number to the current WoW.

Yeah it will lose about 90% of the starting players withing the first few weeks. It's an inevitable fact and not my opinion.

Yes retail also loses players after a while but there's a very different aspect with Classic: it's nothing new, everything we've seen before AND a LOT of people will start playing it just to realize it's nowhere near as fun as their memories make it seem to be in their heads. So it will lose people faster than retail. The only thing that can help keeping a lot of players in for longer is the amount of dead time between the opening of classic and the release of another retail xpack that will bring almost everybody back in like it did every other time.

But I'm sure enough people will keep on playing classic to justify its existence.

[Morssoe]

I seriously doubt it. Classic is not going to launch with 5-7 million players.

True, it will launch with 20million

[Deleted]

By gating the content do you mean with the attunements that originally existed or gated behind needing a certain level of gear? I doubt they'll do some kind of gating where they just don't release it right away.

Gated. Time gated. Just because of keeping it gated. I don't know for sure how Classic will be, changes and all. But one thing I believe for certain is that they will stagger the content and have a progressive release schedule for raids. I highly doubt Naxx will be in the game at release.

[Deleted]

They don't have to drop it, just play Classic over BfA at launch.

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1. Wrong. Vanilla had 7.5 M at its peak, the last release was 5M.

2. No it's not. With 7.5 M in Vanilla and 12 M in WOTLK it's pretty obvious the 5M Legion has are not the same players that played back then.

3. Sure some quit because of that, doesn't mean they won't try Classic again for nostalgia's sake or getting back together with their old guilds. Having a kid doesn't mean you don't have time to do what you like.

4. You don't need to take anything I say in any way, just wait for the numbers and send me a nice PM saying " Woah you were right ".



And millions out of the dozens of millions that played WoW are going to fall in love with WoW again and play it.

and you can send me a nice pm saying "darn you were right" when it falls flat

the problem is your to emotionally attached to see the flaws in your logic and the reality the vanilla just wont be popular in todays day and age. also no one can say current subs are 5 million as its all based on guess work since they dont release numbers any more so thats "5 mil give or take 2-3 mil" which is roughly what they had in vanilla thats also mid expansion. subs peak massively on expansion releases.

" Sure some quit because of that" no most quit because of that we know this because of the millions of polls and the fact wow asks you or used to ask why you are quiting and the data says the majority quit because of time, why do you think the devs have done so much to make wow cost less time ?

[pateuvasiliu]

and you can send me a nice pm saying "darn you were right" when it falls flat

the problem is your to emotionally attached to see the flaws in your logic and the reality the vanilla just wont be popular in todays day and age. also no one can say current subs are 5 million as its all based on guess work since they dont release numbers any more so thats "5 mil give or take 2-3 mil" which is roughly what they had in vanilla thats also mid expansion. subs peak massively on expansion releases.

" Sure some quit because of that" no most quit because of that we know this because of the millions of polls and the fact wow asks you or used to ask why you are quiting and the data says the majority quit because of time, why do you think the devs have done so much to make wow cost less time ?

Such as what? That Vanilla is a better product than Retail?

Vanilla isn't being released for today's market, it's released for the dozens of millions that played WoW back in the day and begged Blizz to bring it back.

I can. If the subs were doing good they'd release numbers. They stopped releasing numbers because the subs were going down and that would hurt their player market.

"5 mil give or take 2-3 mil" which is roughly what they had in vanilla

No. Vanilla had more players than today.

" Sure some quit because of that" no most quit because of that

Surveys don't mean anything. The gross majority of players didn't state a reason.

why do you think the devs have done so much to make wow cost less time ?

Easy. Because the games of today are casual and made to not occupy a lot of time. They are geared towards new, young gamers that lack the attention span and ability to invest effort.

Vanilla was the opposite, it only rewarded those who were willing to play a lot and git gud. WoW of today is a participation award where you need no social skills to find a group ( LFG ) and raids are easy so that everyone can clear them.

[Daffan]

Yes and thank god for it if I had to grind my artifact again I'd have quit instead of rerolled from my warrior when I got tiered of the bus nurf roller coaster

Free boosts for alts is fine IMO. It's when it's so pervasive for mains that it becomes Blizzard playing the game for you, that feels stupid.

they do that so you can level up a alt and do the "CURRENT" content

It worked well in Cata/Mop/Warlords too. Skip everyone past the best content they never even started/finished, so they can farm the last tier for 12-15 months.

It's like giving someone a singleplayer game but skipping every level so they can play the DLC.

[Chakah]

Such as what? That Vanilla is a better product than Retail?

Vanilla isn't being released for today's market, it's released for the dozens of millions that played WoW back in the day and begged Blizz to bring it back.

I can. If the subs were doing good they'd release numbers. They stopped releasing numbers because the subs were going down and that would hurt their player market.

Classic is being released for today's market. Which includes people buying things like the remade NES and SNES systems. Retro gaming is cool.

You don't seem to understand why they stopped releasing sub numbers. It has more to do with the changing gaming market due to mobile than declining sub numbers.

True, it will launch with 20million

uh huh... why not just say 1 BILLION subs?

Ppl will love vanilla because vanilla is an mmorpg. Retail feels like single player game. Thats why vanilla will have more players than bfa.

Get a better guild. I hung out with the same 20 or so people in vanilla in my guild. I still hang out with about 20 people in my retail guild. I don't see that much difference. Get friends and you don't need to use LFD, etc.

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I'm looking forward to a Classic experience, but I have no illusions that the private server market in any way reflects what the Classic sub numbers will look like. The only people I know who used them were ones who visited for a couple of months for the luls and then came back to retail WoW, or who had been caught cheating and had their account banned and went there to get their 'fix'. How many PS accounts represent people shopping for a good server? How many play private because hacking and cheating are easier? How many accounts are bots or gold farmers? I suspect the PS community is not nearly as large as the 2 million number I've seen touted. If Classic hits 1 million users, it would be a absolutely massive success.

Classic will have one major disadvantage that Vanilla never did, competition - a major, polished MMO releasing new content on a regular schedule with millions of players by a top-tier company. A WoW-killer if you will... I think its sweet irony that no one else could being a WoW killer to market, so Blizzard had to do it themselves. Retail will 'kill' Classic. Every time Retail releases significant new content, Classic will see a huge drop in participation. Think of it like playing an alt to pass the time while your main has nothing to do. Classic will be Retails's alt.

This is just a pipe dream. Classic participation will vary with the release schedule of both Retail content and other non-Blizzard gaming. It will be just like Retail. 90% of my guild is playing Destiny 2 right now waiting for Antorus to open.

Vanilla and Classic are a solved puzzle. Wowhead exists. Game mechanics are understood. People will keep resist gear as they level. The 'correct' reps will be farmed. If the AQ gates are going to be closed at the start, people will start saving cloth and other resources immediately upon launch. Ever try re-reading a mystery book when you remember the ending? It will be fun, but it won't be the same.

Classic is going to be super cool, but lets not be delusional about how massive it will be.