The size of the classic queues will be ridiculous at launch

[Kokolums]

Can you imagine? there's probably north of 20 million people who either want to play vanilla again, or never got a chance to before. Blizzard is going to assume the playerbase will be less than half of that. All classic servers will be absolutely slammed for weeks.

[Riproarin]

They will be able to use sharding this time around so probably won't be any worse than the latest expansion releases. People seem to forget they are implementing classic on the current engine and servers

[Kudos]

Massive queues will just be a part of the classic Vanilla experience. I remember waiting hours to create a character on Frostmourne and Barthilas.

[Kapaya]

20 million rofl

[Intuitive]

I can't help but get the feeling that many people on MMO Champion are highly overestimating the actual demand for Classic. Put those nostalgia goggles down and come back to reality.

[Lochton]

Can you imagine? there's probably north of 20 million people who either want to play vanilla again, or never got a chance to before. Blizzard is going to assume the playerbase will be less than half of that. All classic servers will be absolutely slammed for weeks.

I have my doubts that over 20 million players is going to try and log in at launch.

[deniter]

Depends on level of localization.

In old WoW there was no servers in russian, chinese, portuguese, etc. so lots of the gamers that play today didn't have a chance to play WoW in their own language. If they give all of them servers of their own the numbers could exceed the original ones but 20 million sounds a little optimistic, don't you think?

[Doomchicken]

Can you imagine? there's probably north of 20 million people who either want to play vanilla again, or never got a chance to before. Blizzard is going to assume the playerbase will be less than half of that. All classic servers will be absolutely slammed for weeks.

20 million people? You would be lucky to get 2 million let alone 20.

[Raelbo]

Can you imagine? there's probably north of 20 million people who either want to play vanilla again, or never got a chance to before. Blizzard is going to assume the playerbase will be less than half of that. All classic servers will be absolutely slammed for weeks.

No, I can't really imagine north of 20 million players.

Every time Blizzard releases a new expansion, the subscription numbers spike as players come back to try out the new content. I expect the vast majority of people who play Classic will come from the same pool.

Furthermore, I expect the retention rate of classic players to be very low. The game might get a lot of people coming to try it out, but in 3-6 months most will have seen it and moved on. In think this is going to create a bit of a challenge for Blizzard, because how do they balance giving enough server capacity to satiate the intitial interest but keep the servers feeling alive once 90% have buggered off...

[Deleted]

Can you imagine? there's probably north of 20 million people who either want to play vanilla again, or never got a chance to before. Blizzard is going to assume the playerbase will be less than half of that. All classic servers will be absolutely slammed for weeks.

Lol no. /10 chars

[Deleted]

Can you imagine?

Come now. The servers should be able to handle the few thousand that will try it for a week.

[LoLcano]

Can you imagine? there's probably north of 20 million people who either want to play vanilla again, or never got a chance to before. Blizzard is going to assume the playerbase will be less than half of that. All classic servers will be absolutely slammed for weeks.

Only 20 millions ? Nah man there gonna be billions of ppl waiting to play vanilla and there gonna be celebration in streets and Trump himself gonna make the release day a national holiday

[Flarelaine]

Can you imagine? there's probably north of 20 million people who either want to play vanilla again, or never got a chance to before. Blizzard is going to assume the playerbase will be less than half of that. All classic servers will be absolutely slammed for weeks.

Queueing is part of the Vanilla experience.

[Hottage]

* magically conjured subscription numbers *

They will more than likely have sharding for the launch period.

They today mentioned that Classic will be integrated into the Battle.net Client, so a fork/custom database on the retail servers will be a possibility.

As long as I have to spend at least 30min trying to tag enough wolves for my first quest in Northshire Valley, my nostalgia won't be too badly hurt.

[McNeil]

20 million sounds way overblown. The game had 5 million subs back then and I very much doubt that all of these people would come back to play again. Let alone that the remaining 15 million are apparently people being interested to play an old returning game from a dying genre. How can realistically speaking an old game get like 4x more subs then it had when it launched 13 years ago?

There's going to be a load of people playing for sure, not 20 million but more like 2 million. Not sure if they'll be using sharding tech as one of vanilla's changes... otherwise the launch is going to be quite an experience.

[tipsoutbaby]

I am expecting at least 3 million at launch. That's more than there was back in 2004. A LOT of servers are going to be required.

[Pally power]

I'm not going to make a guess as to how many people will play Classic, but I will say that the vanilla private server community has remained relatively large over the course of more than a decade. Keep in mind, back in the day, a million subscriptions meant that your MMO had made it big. The fact that WoW would exceed several million subscriptions was something that absolutely nobody expected, and hasn't been accomplished by any other MMO since. IIRC, Blizzard expected WoW to reach a maximum sub count of around 400K, and yet they seemed to see that as an acceptable outcome to such a large investment as making an MMO.

IMO, if Blizzard is going forward with Classic, it's because they think they can get at least that many subs through the game, if not more.

[Kokolums]

The way i see it, vanilla/bc had around 10 mill at one time at a peak, but many millions more came and went and would return. Plus people from wrath and after that would try it. The more i think about it, the more i realize the classic population will dwarf the BfA population. In fact, BfA will likely benefit as there will be spillover and people signing up just for classic will try BfA.

[Jester Joe]

The way i see it, vanilla/bc had around 10 mill at one time at a peak, but many millions more came and went and would return. Plus people from wrath and after that would try it. The more i think about it, the more i realize the classic population will dwarf the BfA population. In fact, BfA will likely benefit as there will be spillover and people signing up just for classic will try BfA.

Vanilla alone never had 10m
Halfway through BC is when it hit 10m

Thinking classic servers would get double that amount is ridiculously positive thinking.

[Frolk]

Can you imagine? there's probably north of 20 million people who either want to play vanilla again, or never got a chance to before. Blizzard is going to assume the playerbase will be less than half of that. All classic servers will be absolutely slammed for weeks.

Wrong, its only 200 people