Concept: Legacy Realms

[Deleted]

Wall of text inc.

Dear Blizzard, dear WoW Community.

I am a long time WoW player, and I feel the pull to nostalgia. I have always played on the official Servers because I value Blizzards Server stability,
maintenance and customer support highly and Blizzard has always done a great job in running their Servers, "The Blizzard Security" as I like to call it.
This is one of the reasons why i never joined a third party Server.
And I don't want to join a "private" server any time soon because of these reasons, but since Cataclysm i really feel the pull to the old game.
The game i first started in 2004, the burning crusade afterwards, and then the wrath of our beloved lich king.
I feel the urge to play the old versions and to be clear, I am willing to pay to be able to play them. Of course on Blizzards part,
there is some work to be done, in fact a lot of work to be done. But it's worth it, not all players playing on live will ditch live because of Legacy, they will play both, as new content is always a reason to come back, it's something Legacy can NOT provide.
As we have seen in the recent days, it looks like a lot of other WoW veterans or newcomers want to experience the same as I stated above
and if we could have that WITH "The Blizzard Security" man that'd be as great as can be.

So I present to Blizzard a -Legacy- Server concept.

This concept tries to provide a "Blizzard Security" experience for players over a long period of time, all while paying for itself. Yay.

Let's get to the core values:

1. 3 Different Realms, Classic, The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King
2. All realms on the latest patch for their "expansion".
3. You can start a new character on any Realm.
4. You need at least a battle chest to play Legacy.
5. Subscription fees are the same as live.
6. If you have a running subscription you don't need another one.
7. For the beginning get rid of all "new" out of the game features, like mount shop, game time tokens, etc.. (This could maybe be brought in at a later stage, if the community wants it this is a point where Blizzard should do what it did best in the early years: Listen to the community, just like Mr. Kaplan and his team does with Overwatch all the time.)

So with this out of the way, let's go deeper.

First of all, just a few days ago we saw the confirmation that a vanilla Server on its own, with a running subscription would be able to maintain itself,
regarding running costs and maintenance fees, I think this is pretty clear to all of us.

So what makes -Legacy- special?

-Legacy- evolves. How? Every 6 Months, players get the chance to advance to the next expansion. Every 6 Months if you login with a character on your realm, you get to
choose, with each character if you want to advance to the next expansion. This option is available for ALL characters on a realm at the same time, every 6 Months, to secure
a seamless experience with other players in the starting zones.

Yes, you can start a fresh level 1 on each respective expansion realm to experience your favorite game, but advancing like this gives the special feeling of going further
with YOUR character. Feel like you've accomplished everything in Vanilla? Go further with YOUR character. You've defeated Kil'Jaeden multiple times and the Burning Crusade is over? You can go on!
You value YOUR character higher, you more or less bond with it, creating a sense of story progression, character progression, etc. We all love new expansions launches of course
for the new content, but I believe also for advancing further, to get to the next chapter.
And that's what it is about in an RPG right? Feeling and identifying yourself with your characters.


So advancing is of course possible from Classic to TBC and from TBC to WotLK, you can not go back, advancing is a final decision.

Every expansion after Legion adds another expansion to Legacy. So with the expansion after Legion, Cataclysm will be added and so on.

I think that basically sums it up pretty much, I have some more ideas floating in my head, but the baseline is written down and it'S already a wall of text
.
What do you guys think? Any improvements? More ideas?

On a final note:

We don't want to harm you Blizzard, we want to experience something we loved so many years ago legally with your advantages and most important of all: with your support.
Not against each other, but with each other.


TL;DR: Add an Advancement system to progress through expansions with your character. Read core values. We love you Blizzard, WoW dev Team, listen to your community again please.

[Sanguinerd]

Please god when will it eeeeeend

No legacy servers!

[Turtlewithnoshell]

This is getting ridiculous, every day like 10 of these pop up.
"It's so simple I figured out how to run a giant company on a forum."

- - - Updated - - -

Mods start playing whack-a-thread with these. haha

[Donald Hellscream]

Jesus fuck will it ever end!? They won't do it end of story.

[Ethenil]

Hmmm, I'd actually like this.

[Raetary]

ffs, could we just stop?
they are not gonna do it.
basta.
end of story.
finito.
just stop already.

[Justpassing]

This really is a nightmare that won't end...

[Dartz1979]

Wall of text inc.

Dear Blizzard, dear WoW Community.

I am a long time WoW player, and I feel the pull to nostalgia. I have always played on the official Servers because I value Blizzards Server stability,
maintenance and customer support highly and Blizzard has always done a great job in running their Servers, "The Blizzard Security" as I like to call it.
This is one of the reasons why i never joined a third party Server.
And I don't want to join a "private" server any time soon because of these reasons, but since Cataclysm i really feel the pull to the old game.
The game i first started in 2004, the burning crusade afterwards, and then the wrath of our beloved lich king.
I feel the urge to play the old versions and to be clear, I am willing to pay to be able to play them. Of course on Blizzards part,
there is some work to be done, in fact a lot of work to be done. But it's worth it, not all players playing on live will ditch live because of Legacy, they will play both, as new content is always a reason to come back, it's something Legacy can NOT provide.
As we have seen in the recent days, it looks like a lot of other WoW veterans or newcomers want to experience the same as I stated above
and if we could have that WITH "The Blizzard Security" man that'd be as great as can be.

So I present to Blizzard a -Legacy- Server concept.

This concept tries to provide a "Blizzard Security" experience for players over a long period of time, all while paying for itself. Yay.

Let's get to the core values:

1. 3 Different Realms, Classic, The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King
2. All realms on the latest patch for their "expansion".
3. You can start a new character on any Realm.
4. You need at least a battle chest to play Legacy.
5. Subscription fees are the same as live.
6. If you have a running subscription you don't need another one.
7. For the beginning get rid of all "new" out of the game features, like mount shop, game time tokens, etc.. (This could maybe be brought in at a later stage, if the community wants it this is a point where Blizzard should do what it did best in the early years: Listen to the community, just like Mr. Kaplan and his team does with Overwatch all the time.)

So with this out of the way, let's go deeper.

First of all, just a few days ago we saw the confirmation that a vanilla Server on its own, with a running subscription would be able to maintain itself,
regarding running costs and maintenance fees, I think this is pretty clear to all of us.

So what makes -Legacy- special?

-Legacy- evolves. How? Every 6 Months, players get the chance to advance to the next expansion. Every 6 Months if you login with a character on your realm, you get to
choose, with each character if you want to advance to the next expansion. This option is available for ALL characters on a realm at the same time, every 6 Months, to secure
a seamless experience with other players in the starting zones.

Yes, you can start a fresh level 1 on each respective expansion realm to experience your favorite game, but advancing like this gives the special feeling of going further
with YOUR character. Feel like you've accomplished everything in Vanilla? Go further with YOUR character. You've defeated Kil'Jaeden multiple times and the Burning Crusade is over? You can go on!
You value YOUR character higher, you more or less bond with it, creating a sense of story progression, character progression, etc. We all love new expansions launches of course
for the new content, but I believe also for advancing further, to get to the next chapter.
And that's what it is about in an RPG right? Feeling and identifying yourself with your characters.


So advancing is of course possible from Classic to TBC and from TBC to WotLK, you can not go back, advancing is a final decision.

Every expansion after Legion adds another expansion to Legacy. So with the expansion after Legion, Cataclysm will be added and so on.

I think that basically sums it up pretty much, I have some more ideas floating in my head, but the baseline is written down and it'S already a wall of text
.
What do you guys think? Any improvements? More ideas?

On a final note:

We don't want to harm you Blizzard, we want to experience something we loved so many years ago legally with your advantages and most important of all: with your support.
Not against each other, but with each other.


TL;DR: Add an Advancement system to progress through expansions with your character. Read core values. We love you Blizzard, WoW dev Team, listen to your community again please.

Sounds like alot of work for blizzard to do but now that i think about it if they do that would bring in more subs that liked the older original content so yeah if they are smart they should discuss this at the board meetings

[Deleted]

Leave the decision to Blizzard, if they're doing it or not. If you don't have to say something, don't. Why don't you just state if you would like something like this or not? Instead of being completely destructive.

[Deleted]

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[Deleted]

What do you guys think? Any improvements? More ideas?

Sounds expensive. Maintaining 3 different code bases adds complexity (because bugs/exploits still need to be fixed right?)
This would have negative effect on the team - new content takes too long as it is. I don't want them to split their efforts.

[Maischou]

I'm sorry, but right off the bat your idea is infeasible and running on faulty assumptions.

Just because Nostralius had many active players does not mean that it would translate into an equal number of paying players. The argument that Nostralius had enough players for several vanilla realms, and therefore enough players to warrant servers, is just pure misguided. In the realm of hardware and software, there is strength in numbers and uniformity.

1. Realm Maintenance
All live servers run the same setups with the same code and the same maintenance routines. If you know how to maintain one server you know how to maintain all of them. Introducing just one different class of servers (vanilla) means an entirely separate set of maintainance procedures and servers. The Blizzard devs are most likely right when they say that old servers were written to run on old hardware. If you take a look at some of the Blizzard engineers describe some of their code, it's obvious that they go deep in order to gain performance. There's no guarantee that old code would run well, or at all, on modern commodity hardware.

2. Code Maintenance
The moment you wrote "get rid of all "new" out of the game features", you suggested that Blizzard take their current code base (which has evolved over a decade away from vanilla) and branch it to perform additional development work. From design, through implementation to testing that is expensive. Not just that, your implication is that they combine old-school mechanics with new-school improvements. That's even more expensive. You can't just plug code together and hope that it works.

Even if you could accept the exact client versions that you suggest, it would mean maintaining (or adding support for) multiple variations of the WoW server infrastructure. All for 150.000 peak players. Even if that were 150.000 paying subscribers, it is eclipsed by the several million players paying for live. Even if a significant portion of those millions were serious about classic versions (and that's a huge "if"), that would still mean maintaining several various code bases for a fraction of your players.

No matter how you turn it, it's a horrible business case.

A far better business case (and I'm not even kidding on this one), is to go back and re-tune all old content to make it challenging to the classes as they are currently built if you lock your level to an expansion. They'd have to go over and re-think every single mob and boss ability to make it fit into the current constellations. They would have to consider edge cases and abuses with uncommon ability use and class combos. They may even have to add assets and code to make it work properly with newer classes. And it would still be a better and cheaper alternative to "legacy" servers.

[Pull My Finger]

It's really ridiculous by now.

Just let it go, for Pete's sake. That was 10+ friggin' years ago! I can hardly remember my girlfriend from 12 years ago. Didn't anything happen during the last decade of these people's lives?

[ls-]

Lel, now we have a demand for Vanilla/TBC/WotLK/etc realms, people aren't even sure that there's enough crowd to make official Vanilla realm profitable, and now people want even more, hilarious

[Dartz1979]

I really don't see why blizzard doesnt wanna offer legacy servers look at diablo 2 they still have that server/old game going it's been around forever, so why not have legacy servers for WoW imagine the amount of money they'd get from all the old school subs coming back to play that'd mean more money for them.

[Kiljaedon]

I'm sorry, but right off the bat your idea is infeasible and running on faulty assumptions.

Just because Nostralius had many active players does not mean that it would translate into an equal number of paying players. The argument that Nostralius had enough players for several vanilla realms, and therefore enough players to warrant servers, is just pure misguided. In the realm of hardware and software, there is strength in numbers and uniformity.

1. Realm Maintenance
All live servers run the same setups with the same code and the same maintenance routines. If you know how to maintain one server you know how to maintain all of them. Introducing just one different class of servers (vanilla) means an entirely separate set of maintainance procedures and servers. The Blizzard devs are most likely right when they say that old servers were written to run on old hardware. If you take a look at some of the Blizzard engineers describe some of their code, it's obvious that they go deep in order to gain performance. There's no guarantee that old code would run well, or at all, on modern commodity hardware.

2. Code Maintenance
The moment you wrote "get rid of all "new" out of the game features", you suggested that Blizzard take their current code base (which has evolved over a decade away from vanilla) and branch it to perform additional development work. From design, through implementation to testing that is expensive. Not just that, your implication is that they combine old-school mechanics with new-school improvements. That's even more expensive. You can't just plug code together and hope that it works.

Even if you could accept the exact client versions that you suggest, it would mean maintaining (or adding support for) multiple variations of the WoW server infrastructure. All for 150.000 peak players. Even if that were 150.000 paying subscribers, it is eclipsed by the several million players paying for live. Even if a significant portion of those millions were serious about classic versions (and that's a huge "if"), that would still mean maintaining several various code bases for a fraction of your players.

No matter how you turn it, it's a horrible business case.

A far better business case (and I'm not even kidding on this one), is to go back and re-tune all old content to make it challenging to the classes as they are currently built if you lock your level to an expansion. They'd have to go over and re-think every single mob and boss ability to make it fit into the current constellations. They would have to consider edge cases and abuses with uncommon ability use and class combos. They may even have to add assets and code to make it work properly with newer classes. And it would still be a better and cheaper alternative to "legacy" servers.

Every reply you have given is based on your perception and therefore opinion like mine is. You do not know the maintenance costs or how hard it would be to manage such code because it is being done right now on EverQuest despite 17 years of changes. Vanilla servers will not be 100% like the original servers but there is business opportunity there and a possibility does exsist since there is enough interest. Just because you like to make stuff up to try to shoot down people who want such a server is absurd. If you are not part of the Blizzard team then please do not act like your speculation makes something not valid.

[FlemmMinis]

This concept is new and innovative

[TriHard]

When will you guys learn that the interest for classic realms is effin huge? Stop hating and go somewhere else.

Mmo champion, PC Gamer, Gamespot, IGN, Newspapers and other types of sites would not bother with this conversation if it wasn't
important to A TON of people. Get it in your damn heads, also it isn't all about the classic realms, it is also about the state of WoW being so
damn bad that even their most true and loyal fans have quit.

[Rendark]

sigh... It is very unlikely Blizzard will make legacy servers. GET. OVER. IT.

[IxilaFA]

This is a completely new and original idea. So original that it warranted a whole new topic instead of going in one of the ten existing threads for discussion.