Originally Posted by
aerosyne
One-hundred thousand a month is 1.2 million a year. Let's use your quoted employee number of 4700. The average salary of a game designer is between $40K and $60K from Recruiter up to $70K to $90K. Since this is Blizzard, let's go with a figure of $65K which is on the higher end of the starting salaries.
Blizzard would need 305.5 million George Washingtons to pay all of those salaries if forced to in a lump sum. If the Nostalrius server really had 150K people paying at a rate of $15 a month, they would have made a solid 27 million for the year, which is a whopping 8.84% of the necessary money just to pay the employee salaries. This is excluding the people needing to be hired to keep the server(s) maintained and running, the overhead costs of electricity, water, heat, internet, space, air and the costs needed to actually get the servers up and running.
Nothing better than seeing 'LF1M UBRS, HAVE KEY' in trade chat become 'LF7M UBRS, HAVE KEY' because six randos were tired of waiting. Truly, it was the best of times.
The reason people didn't give a shit about raiding is the same reason people still don't give a shit about it today: it's a bitch to prepare for. It had nothing to do with some mysterious 'philosophy' or 'ethos' or bullshit like that. The more I hear garbage like this, the more I'm convinced that the vast majority of people who want these legacy servers are just World of Warcraft hipster douches who just want something to feel like special snowflakes about.
Seriously, how many of you guys are still in high school or graduated while never taking a STEM course or two? I'm extremely curious because it would explain why so many people think running a quality server is just this stupidly easy, plug-n-play process when it couldn't be further from the truth.
First, more than twelve million people have played this game and you're an idiot for thinking the sub curve is an indicator for all the people who have ever played the game.
Second, you are assuming those 'nine million', which is likely upwards of twenty million easily, would all come back for these legacy servers. I know plenty of people who played during Classic and quit, plenty who played during BC and quit, plenty who played during every iteration of the game and quit because they didn't like it. These same people would not come back simply because Classic servers exist because they didn't like the game itself.
Lastly, I am seriously impressed by how many people like you showed up in this thread and proceeded to provide all the proof that your camp is everything people complain it is: full of loud-mouthed, rude butt-hats that constantly need to employ mental gymnastics while simultaneously shitting on anyone who even thinks of disagreeing with you. We're not against legacy servers, we're against assholes who are so insecure that they feel the need to insult anyone who disagrees with them while performing Olympic level mental gymnastics to even attempt to give their point credence. Hats off, guys. I thought the Adventure Time and Steven Universe fans were officially the worst online communities, but you have managed to put the WoW community back on top. Gold medals all around.