If they announce legacy servers at Blizzcon, would you play them?

[Deleted]

I think there is no doubt there are a lot of people playing in private servers.
The true question is if they are willing to pay for it. And how much?

I still believe no matter what there would be a lot of people playing on Blizzard official legacy servers.
Blizzard failing to bring players to play their game? That would be a first.

[Tic Tacs]

Right idea, wrong question. Getting people that exclusively play on private back to retail, even for free is a win as you go from 0 potential for revenue to more than zero ar extremely low marginal cost, and because of 'network effects' in MMO games. Besides, box sales and sub revenues are the 'old' models, in-game monetization is the name of he modern game. So the 'right' question to ask is: How would you get a current wow player to spend more whilst playing on a legacy realm than he would be spending while on 8.x, without having the other players in that mode abandoning ship.

Do you really think majority of people who play on private servers can afford retail copy? I agree, some of the jumped the ship "disliking" Blizzard for not introducing Vanilla servers because they feel like reliving their past days but these are vastly a minority, I can assure you - there are bunch of Legion private servers with thousands of players, why do you think they don't play on retail? I can name a million reason but at the end of the day it comes down to not able to afford the game.

Also, if they do make Vanilla servers in the future and I'm sure they will, do you really think that would be a good idea to have less exposure to the game? Blizzard can easily make most of the popular private servers go down by the legal means, however, they only do that to the most popular ones to make sure that the community exists for more exposure and doesn't interfere with their business.

TLDR My point is that when the game becomes barely profitable Activision Blizzard will introduce legacy servers to squeeze everything they can.

[Deleted]

Blizzard can easily make most of the popular private servers go down by the legal means, however, they only do that to the most popular ones to make sure that the community exists for more exposure and doesn't interfere with their business.

You see, that's why i support private servers of Vanilla. I don't see them as a criminal activity because Blizzard is not delivering that experience anymore and people want to play it!
If Blizzard released legacy servers EVERYONE would finally see private servers as a criminal activity.
Right now they are the unsung heroes of people who want to experience Vanilla and simply can't any other way.

[Tic Tacs]

You see, that's why i support private servers of Vanilla. I don't see them as a criminal activity because Blizzard is not delivering that experience anymore and people want to play it!
If Blizzard released legacy servers EVERYONE would finally see private servers as a criminal activity.
Right now they are the unsung heroes of people who want to experience Vanilla and simply can't any other way.

Noble cause but you are supporting criminals, look what happened to most recent private server drama, admins ran away with donation and gold scam money in $10,000+. I can name few other that did the say back couple of years ago.

[Deleted]

Yes, but I fear it would get old really fast since I played actively during Vanilla and it would all be too familiar.

[Ielenia]

Legacy servers would have progression. Retail WoW has handheld mechanics that pull you into every new raid. Catch-up mechanics negate progression.

Legacy definitely won't have progression. Like I said, Blizzard already has a Warcraft MMO with progression: it's retail WoW. And as for your so-called "handheld mechanics that pull you into every new raid", in a legacy progression server, they'd eventually make into the legacy server, just like they did when the retail game was at that time. Don't think for a second that Blizzard would make a progression legacy server and not add the same mechanics the subsequent expansions added.

And worse: in a progression legacy server, I bet Blizzard would give a better pace to releasing old content, so players don't get a "content drought" like it happened in the liver servers in-between expansions, meaning you'd have less time to enjoy your "precious lost mechanics".

[Deleted]

Noble cause but you are supporting criminals, look what happened to most recent private server drama, admins ran away with donation and gold scam money in $10,000+. I can name few other that did the say back couple of years ago.

Yeah some of them are scumbags but the other half is good people trying to deliever the experience that is no longer possible to play.
It's hard to see "donations" as a scumbag thing...at least for me.

[Ielenia]

Because this solves two problems: shows that there are people who are able to pay for Vanilla and also that there is no need to drain money from some other Blizzard projects.

Kickstarter is not for multi-million companies to use to fund side projects. That's kind of like a rich person applying for welfare to feed their sibling.

[HuxNeva]

Do you really think majority of people who play on private servers can afford retail copy? I agree, some of the jumped the ship "disliking" Blizzard for not introducing Vanilla servers because they feel like reliving their past days but these are vastly a minority, I can assure you - there are bunch of Legion private servers with thousands of players, why do you think they don't play on retail? I can name a million reason but at the end of the day it comes down to not able to afford the game.

The answer is not a simple yes or no. There is most certainly a lage group of players that can easily afford it, and just prefer the private environment (many reasons: mainly playing another (older) version of the game, but for some it is also the strength of the community. Then there are lots and lots of kids to whom the whole concept of paying a sub is alien and ridiculous, evn though they might spend 20€ on a LoL skin. They don't have a credit card, or even if they did, they play with thei friends and getting them all subbed is just not in the cards. Blizzard knows this and came halfway making the game F2P for everyone smart enough to make some gold, but that doesn't mesh with everyone and still needs a bootstrap or a restart if you're not consistent in playing.

Also, if they do make Vanilla servers in the future and I'm sure they will, do you really think that would be a good idea to have less exposure to the game? Blizzard can easily make most of the popular private servers go down by the legal means, however, they only do that to the most popular ones to make sure that the community exists for more exposure and doesn't interfere with their business.

TLDR My point is that when the game becomes barely profitable Activision Blizzard will introduce legacy servers to squeeze everything they can.

Well, they'll make it if they are convinced a classic server would create higher net margin for them then not having it. Fo now, I don't think that is the case and they are choosing (successfully) to bring the game back more to its roots.

[clevin]

I think there is no doubt there are a lot of people playing in private servers.
The true question is if they are willing to pay for it. And how much?.

And for how long?

Let's say that EVERY private server vanilla player was willing to pay $15 for just that (so $30 if they play retail too, ignoring discounts). Let's say there are, oh, 300k of those people. Wow, that's $4.5m/month!!!!

Now, How many of those people will still be willing to pay after 3 months? 6? 12? If there's 50k left paying after 12 months, that's $750k/month which is nothing to Blizzard. Even the $4.5m, while it sounds good, is gross revenue. Gotta pay for GMs, servers, server admins, etc. And that's assuming that they don't do any post-launch dev or QA.

There's just no path to this being a lot of money for Blizzard unless legacy got north of 1m subs and those subs stuck around for awhile. They're better off doing new products which have the possibility of years worth of significant revenue. Example? Overwatch.

[Deleted]

Long live vanilla World of Warcraft!!

[primalmatter]

I would return to a tbc server... I am not really sure if I trust blizzard with running a legacy server. Worse I don't trust its player base. How long would it honestly take for players to demand that appearances, mounts,and even characters be made available on current servers?

Knowing this community hours at best.

[Echocho]

Legacy definitely won't have progression.

Do you have a source to go with that opinion?

[Tic Tacs]

The answer is not a simple yes or no. There is most certainly a lage group of players that can easily afford it, and just prefer the private environment (many reasons: mainly playing another (older) version of the game, but for some it is also the strength of the community. Then there are lots and lots of kids to whom the whole concept of paying a sub is alien and ridiculous, evn though they might spend 20€ on a LoL skin. They don't have a credit card, or even if they did, they play with thei friends and getting them all subbed is just not in the cards. Blizzard knows this and came halfway making the game F2P for everyone smart enough to make some gold, but that doesn't mesh with everyone and still needs a bootstrap or a restart if you're not consistent in playing.

I agree with you on most points. However, I think you are living in the fantasy if you think they made game tokens to let people play free. WoW is definitely not a free to play game, more of free to win game where you can buy $20 tokens and sell them on auction house generating even more profit for Activision Blizzard.

I'm pretty sure Blizzard generates in-game gold themselves and buy their own tokens that they sell for $20 to make the cash flowing even faster hence such a high auction house inflation and such a high demand for them, this is speculative of course. Yes, you can basically play free if you farm gold yourself and buy these tokens from auction house but the game is definitely not F2P, retail box costs money.

[Deleted]

And for how long?

Let's say that EVERY private server vanilla player was willing to pay $15 for just that (so $30 if they play retail too, ignoring discounts). Let's say there are, oh, 300k of those people. Wow, that's $4.5m/month!!!!

Now, How many of those people will still be willing to pay after 3 months? 6? 12? If there's 50k left paying after 12 months, that's $750k/month which is nothing to Blizzard. Even the $4.5m, while it sounds good, is gross revenue. Gotta pay for GMs, servers, server admins, etc. And that's assuming that they don't do any post-launch dev or QA.

There's just no path to this being a lot of money for Blizzard unless legacy got north of 1m subs and those subs stuck around for awhile. They're better off doing new products which have the possibility of years worth of significant revenue. Example? Overwatch.

The thing is, and i'm just talking out of my ass so correct if i'm wrong.
But don't you think if Vanilla was 12€ a month and 1million people payed the first Month....thats already profit?

I always thought about this every new expansion.
If Blizzard have 5 million players and each payed for the box (around 40€) and then pay each month 12€....thats like 260 million dollars on the first month!

The raw number of players playing blizzard games makes for huge profit...on the first month even.

[Eleccybubb]

Long live vanilla World of Warcraft!!

Meh nowhere near the best login theme. All the Login themes are good.

But the best 3 for me are MoP, WoD and Wrath.

[clevin]

The thing is, and i'm just talking out of my ass so correct if i'm wrong.
But don't you think if Vanilla was 12€ a month and 1million people payed the first Month....thats already profit?

Not necessarily. Depends on what they spend to get it up and running, add GMs, servers etc. Also, remember that if they add new staff that they want some reasonable assurance that they will be needed for more than a few months. You don't look at a new $60k/year employee as just costing $5000 for the first month even though that's the cash outlay then. You budget them for at least a year.

I always thought about this every new expansion.
If Blizzard have 5 million players and each payed for the box (around 40€) and then pay each month 12€....thats like 260 million dollars on the first month!

The raw number of players playing blizzard games makes for huge profit...on the first month even.

There are three things wrong here. Since you didn't spot them before posting:

1) Legacy servers would have a $50 expansion price? Cool! Oh wait... now it's not just whether people would pay a sub fee it's whether they'd pay a sub fee AND $50 to get back in. Hmm....

2) 5 million. That's the LIVE server count (roughly). You assume there would be 5m people who would 1) want to play Legacy and 2) pay $50 to get back in. That's almost certainly wrong.

3) Revenue != profit. Not all of those sales are direct from Blizzard, retailers take a big chunk.

Bonus wrongness: "...thats like 260 million dollars on the first month" - Expansion box revenue is a onetime thing. Not recurring.

Look, you can make up numbers all day but there's no way 5M people would come back to Legacy and pay. It wouldn't surprise me if 500k-1m came back for a month if the client was free (if it was $50 I think you can knock that back by a factor of 3-5) and they could check it out for $15 but I'd be very very surprised if more than 3-500k were there 6 months later and I'd be shocked if more than 1-200k were there much longer than 12 months.

For a small studio, that would be good revenue. For someone the size of Blizzard like I said above they need to think about whether it's the best way to invest those resources.

[anon5123]

I couldnt play legacy servers just because they wont have xmog. That was introduced in cata and I dont wanna go back to there. Although legendary rogue daggers.

At some point though if there were legacy servers, you are going to reach a point where you cant do anything because you are max level, have all the BIS gear (no TF or WF) and have a shit ton of gold. So what are you going to do?

PvP.

Play alts.

Monopolize the auction house.

Gank people.

Help out guildmates.

There's plenty of fun things to do.

[Dormie]

They would never charge for Vanilla servers, it would just be a feature like RP servers are a feature.

[Shridevi]

I would love them. Especially if they progressed like WoW did historically patch by patch, expansion by expansion, but maybe 2x speed to cut downtime. I've had enough with private vanilla servers, there are so many issues and no one trusts them.