Classic update. It will be on 1.12 and it will be on battle.net :)

[Deleted]

Very nice, i cant wait to play classic wow again, brings back the great memories.

[Chaelexi]

Any time you utilize the words 'good' or 'bad,' you're stating an opinion. Not a fact. It may be your opinion that these technologies aren't good, considering the gaps they are meant to shore up, but it's far from fact. In 2018, being able to play with people who aren't located on the same specific server blade as you, leads to more play opportunities than not being able to. Not liking the tech, doesn't change this fact.

Hammer meet nail head. As I have said in previous posts you will likely see sharding in Classic as it will allow them to run high population, high active population servers during the initial launch but after attrition of the launch, people getting bored, people realizing that vanilla is not the game they though it was, etc.... these servers will still have an active enough population. Sharding will handle the 5k per starting zone you will see at launch and not crash everyone's computer, it is not only server side these issue will be resolved but peoples computers handling this influx. If it launches will 5k people per zone no one will do anything and people will quit.


If they do not do sharding and do lower pop servers most of them will end up as deadzones and not have enough of a population to maintain a health raiding guild and then you will be stuck with merged realms or worse forced migrations.

The content was never challenging. It never will be challenging. I don't ever remember talking to people in dungeons back in Classic, either. Not unless someone was messing it up for the rest of us. Just because you had to spam chat looking for a group, doesn't mean it was any more social than it is now. It just means that you had to utilize social skills to even get started, back then. Which wasn't always a good thing.

You really prefer waiting for 40 minutes for a tank to want to do the content you were wanting to do? Content that isn't even that important to begin with? Pugging back then wasn't any different than LFG is now, it just automates the task and helps you find people to play with... people you will chat with, add to your friends list, and play with again, if you really want to. Of course, you miss the part where you don't have to use the LFG to begin with... Spam your trade channel LF pugs. It's still possible. Add em to your friends list. Nothing was taken away from the game by adding those features.

There were LFG addons in true Vanilla, they used the world PVP channels(so you had to be rank 5 to use it) to form groups. There will be again in classic and the efficient people will use it and the people who think it goes against Vanilla's #NoChanges will whine about it.....

As far as a 'good' social aspect goes... there you go with those opinions again. People play Wow because the game play is where they like it. When it's not, they stop playing. It's as simple as that. That's why the subscriber numbers have been cycling the way they have. The people who originally started playing in Classic have grown up. Re-prioritized their lives. Have started careers, families. It's very unlikely that any game could ever hold a players attention for this long, that's just a factual part of the games industry. I love A Link to the Past more than Wow. But that doesn't mean I'll play it and ignore anything else that comes along.

No, I recognize that games suffer from diminishing returns. That over time, even the best of the best of the most favorite of the most awesome games, will lose a players focus. People change. So do interests. This idea that Classic wow captured something that could be contained forever, that's somehow been lost since TBC, which will return with Classic Wow relaunch, is actually pretty ridiculous.



Sub counts don't indicate anything other than active current subscribers. It's not a metric for any other purpose. Lots of subscribers? Hey, lots of people playing. Less subscribers? Less people playing. Doesn't change the fact that Wow has gone from a niche MMO to a mainstream game.

Best example is the Battle Royale Genre. It is a cycling mess of which one is popular this week. Fortnite, PUBG, Realm Royale or the new one that is released next week. The reason these are popular is that they allow people to play a game for 12-20 minutes and leave. It works in the current consumption model of all media. It is also why Netflix is winning the battle with cable TV. you can watch stuff when you want to for how long you want to.

[Azurenys]

As someone who hasn't bothered with vanilla private servers, but is highly interested in WoW Classic, I can tell you exactly what I'm going to do:


Step #1 Spend a month or so before launch getting in touch with old (and new) friends and players and figure out things like which server and faction we're going to roll on. (And, because it's now, probably get some sort of facebook/scuttlebutt/whatever page set up. Maybe even do a mailing list, just for nostalgia feel.) Get vent/discord/mumble/whatever up and running.
Step #2 Avoid launch day. Form a guild, get folks on-board, and spend some time catching up on life while doing early quests or just hanging around IF, or wherever.
Step #2.5 Get folks' schedules figured out, deal with the inevitable bits of drama, see how big the guild is, maybe bring in some old/new blood.
Step #3 Level. Level slooow, because, even if I'm playing a lot, that'll still only be 10-20 hours per week (some weekends will be empty, so I'll probably binge every month or two, but most won't and life>>>WoW).
Step #4 Keep my crafting skills up as I level, which is going to make it even slower.
Step #5 Help friends, and random strangers, through group quests, elite areas, and dungeons (including organizing expeditions to dungeons in the first place).
Step #6 Eventually get to level cap in a year or two, and start working a little on gearing, sticking my nose into early endgame stuff, mostly just take it easy and fish and cook, maybe do a little working on my endgame crafting.

That sounds like a huge waste of time.. you are highly interested in Vanilla but you are going to take 1-2 years to level up before you even get to proper pvp/endgame raiding?
I think you'll get bored and quit long before level 60

[Chaelexi]

And don't forget the sheer logistics of it all - organizing forty people (actually, more, because you're going to need benchwarmers for no-shows, maybe people who swap in and out for specific fights, and all the prep going into getting those 40 ready) without many of the conveniences modern WoW players have become used to; the organizational difficult does not scale linearly.

I laugh at this as most of the top end guilds had extremely short benches. I know for a fact that Deus Vox had a bench of under 6 players. the guild had 48 people in it. the 3 extras were bot accounts that would yell into the guild when the green dragons or Kazzak spawned.

You are making the mistake many people here seem to be making: you think Classic is targeted at raiders, current players, and people like them; news flash, it isn't - Classic WoW is targeted at the millions of casuals who quit, people who don't want minigames, and don't want to raid, either (if they did want those things, they already have games they can play for them). They just want their MMORPG, a market that is massively underserved right now; if anything is going to threaten WoW Classic, it will be another company realizing there's money in them thar MMORPGs, a building something that actually fits the niche, instead of being a glorified lobby game built on casino-derived behavioral conditioning (or Blizzard is wrong, and no one wants an MMORPG - but either way, please stop attempting the risible argument that a game that was never about raiding for the vast majority of its playerbase will fail because it doesn't support everyone raiding).

Vanilla was about raiding or grinding PVP. Everything in the game lead you to raid, the quest at the entrance to BRD to attune you to MC. Look the same thing happened for BWL, they put the quest outside of BRS. Now AQ they got the whole server involved by having farming quests for mats, released repeatable quests for Silithus for BIS trinket and encouraged a server wide war effort against the old god. Next they have a world event for Naxx to get you gear for entering Nax. It was the first gear catchup mechanic they made. Your logic of 1% raided Naxx is flawed because a high % raided MC and BWL. The issue was that in Vanilla people truthfully did not understand the scope of raiding. I know because as we brought recruits into Deus Vox we had to train them on how to raid and that is why a large majority of the player base did not get into Naxx/AQ40(passed twin emps).

As someone who hasn't bothered with vanilla private servers, but is highly interested in WoW Classic, I can tell you exactly what I'm going to do:


Step #1 Spend a month or so before launch getting in touch with old (and new) friends and players and figure out things like which server and faction we're going to roll on. (And, because it's now, probably get some sort of facebook/scuttlebutt/whatever page set up. Maybe even do a mailing list, just for nostalgia feel.) Get vent/discord/mumble/whatever up and running.
Step #2 Avoid launch day. Form a guild, get folks on-board, and spend some time catching up on life while doing early quests or just hanging around IF, or wherever.
Step #2.5 Get folks schedules figured out, deal with the inevitable bits of drama, see how big the guild is, maybe bring in some old/new blood.
Step #3 Level. Level slooow, because, even if I'm playing a lot, that'll still only be 10-20 hours per week (some weekends will be empty, so I'll probably binge every month or two, but most won't and life>>>WoW).
Step #4 Keep my crafting skills up as I level, which is going to make it even slower.
Step #5 Help friends, and random strangers, through group quests, elite areas, and dungeons (including organizing expeditions to dungeons in the first place).
Step #6 Eventually get to level cap in a year or two, and start working a little on gearing, sticking my nose into early endgame stuff, mostly just take it easy and fish and cook, maybe do a little working on my endgame crafting.

You time line is so wrong. Slow leveling in Vanilla is 20 days played and if you are playing that slow you are going to end up with alot of rested XP which inturn speeds up leveling. I leveled fast in over a month and a bit with no knowledge of optimized routes, which quests are time sinks, kept enchanting and tailoring at very close to max, a bunch of other bad decisions(going to BFD when I was a human) and did STV on a PVP server. It was just over 11 days played. At 20 days played that is 480 hours. Even at 10 hours a week you are going to do it in 48 weeks at most and that is 11 months if you do not go over that. End game crafting.......you mean make a crappy epic robe, if you can get the pattern, make an arcanite reaper, if you can get a pattern or have to go into MC to get the patterns from their......people talk like endgame crafting was a huge deal but in reality you got a whole lot of nothing from it.

[Hottage]

That sounds like a huge waste of time.. you are highly interested in Vanilla but you are going to take 1-2 years to level up before you even get to proper pvp/endgame raiding?
I think you'll get bored and quit long before level 60

Different people like different things.

Absolutely outrageous, I know.

[Azurenys]

Different people like different things.

Absolutely outrageous, I know.

Has nothing to do with liking different stuff. Your comment is also neither clever nor original, keep up the shitposting work.

It's very unlikely that the person I commented would find all his plans satisfying, judging by experience he'll get massively bored long before even hitting level cap, simply because WoW is neither new or shiny and his possible adventures will be extremely limited and cheapened by the fact most people would know everything in the game already.

But hey, it's better to waste your time I guess

[Deficineiron]

Vanilla was about raiding or grinding PVP. Everything in the game lead you to raid, the quest at the entrance to BRD to attune you to MC. Look the same thing happened for BWL, they put the quest outside of BRS. Now AQ they got the whole server involved by having farming quests for mats, released repeatable quests for Silithus for BIS trinket and encouraged a server wide war effort against the old god. Next they have a world event for Naxx to get you gear for entering Nax. It was the first gear catchup mechanic they made. Your logic of 1% raided Naxx is flawed because a high % raided MC and BWL. The issue was that in Vanilla people truthfully did not understand the scope of raiding. I know because as we brought recruits into Deus Vox we had to train them on how to raid and that is why a large majority of the player base did not get into Naxx/AQ40(passed twin emps).

what % of the playerbase at end-classic had a level 60 toon?
what % had even set foot in a 40-man raid? in aq40?

I think you are treating a small subset of the customer base as if it were much larger. the genius of classic (vs now at any rate) is that it was intended to provide content for players that might NEVER hit max level - the customer who plays 5 hours a week on average, for example, bumbles around, does leveling bracket bg's, etc.

You time line is so wrong. Slow leveling in Vanilla is 20 days played and if you are playing that slow you are going to end up with alot of rested XP which inturn speeds up leveling. I leveled fast in over a month and a bit with no knowledge of optimized routes, which quests are time sinks, kept enchanting and tailoring at very close to max, a bunch of other bad decisions(going to BFD when I was a human) and did STV on a PVP server. It was just over 11 days played. At 20 days played that is 480 hours. Even at 10 hours a week you are going to do it in 48 weeks at most and that is 11 months if you do not go over that. End game crafting.......you mean make a crappy epic robe, if you can get the pattern, make an arcanite reaper, if you can get a pattern or have to go into MC to get the patterns from their......people talk like endgame crafting was a huge deal but in reality you got a whole lot of nothing from it.

once again - I know he said 10-20 hours a week so say avg 15, but

1) you can actually avoid most of the rested xp bonus if you want to. He didn't clarify this. When I just wanted to level, I intentionally avoided logging in a rested area.
2) what if he likes to do bg's? or instances (terrible xp-hour once the quests are done), or prowl around ganking people or more general world pvp?


my point is, there are folks with zero hurry to get to max and they can take an awful long time to get there despite knowing the game inside-out.

[Eroginous]

what % of the playerbase at end-classic had a level 60 toon?
what % had even set foot in a 40-man raid? in aq40?

I think you are treating a small subset of the customer base as if it were much larger. the genius of classic (vs now at any rate) is that it was intended to provide content for players that might NEVER hit max level - the customer who plays 5 hours a week on average, for example, bumbles around, does leveling bracket bg's, etc.

\

You're conflating 'how did most players spend their time' vs 'what the intended goal of the overall adventure.' He's not saying most people raided or pvp'd. He's saying that the version of the game we're discussing didn't have anything to do outside of activities meant to progress you towards end game. That:

1. The entire scope of the game was to progress to a point of maximum power so you could defeat the hardest game content.

2. The barrier to entry in that content was so high that it literally prevented most people from even being able to participate, should they have wanted to.

I know, because I remember having 700g and thinking how rich I was on my level 60 war with a 100% speed Frost Wolf. I remember not having the time to sink into pvp progression because of how you would lose honor over time and not be able to keep your current rank if you didn't play often enough. Working full time kinda made that difficult. I also remember not being able to jump into my guilds 40 man group because I was behind on attunements I missed when everyone else was doing them and having zero frost resist gear because I kept giving it away to the tanks and healers after sinking all my time into crafting it.

I was the proud orc blacksmith/engineer, helping everyone else do the thing that I didn't have the raw free time to do. It wasn't a matter of skill or attitude. The game was not designed to be doable without x, y, and z, prerequisites. Which required more knowledge and planning than the average gamer is used to expending in a video game (even back then).

once again - I know he said 10-20 hours a week so say avg 15, but

1) you can actually avoid most of the rested xp bonus if you want to. He didn't clarify this. When I just wanted to level, I intentionally avoided logging in a rested area.
2) what if he likes to do bg's? or instances (terrible xp-hour once the quests are done), or prowl around ganking people or more general world pvp?


my point is, there are folks with zero hurry to get to max and they can take an awful long time to get there despite knowing the game inside-out.

And I think his point is that they will be left behind and not have much of a reason to be playing with others to begin with.

[Deficineiron]

\

You're conflating 'how did most players spend their time' vs 'what the intended goal of the overall adventure.' He's not saying most people raided or pvp'd. He's saying that the version of the game we're discussing didn't have anything to do outside of activities meant to progress you towards end game. That:

1. The entire scope of the game was to progress to a point of maximum power so you could defeat the hardest game content.

2. The barrier to entry in that content was so high that it literally prevented most people from even being able to participate, should they have wanted to.

I know, because I remember having 700g and thinking how rich I was on my level 60 war with a 100% speed Frost Wolf. I remember not having the time to sink into pvp progression because of how you would lose honor over time and not be able to keep your current rank if you didn't play often enough. Working full time kinda made that difficult. I also remember not being able to jump into my guilds 40 man group because I was behind on attunements I missed when everyone else was doing them and having zero frost resist gear because I kept giving it away to the tanks and healers after sinking all my time into crafting it.

I was the proud orc blacksmith/engineer, helping everyone else do the thing that I didn't have the raw free time to do. It wasn't a matter of skill or attitude. The game was not designed to be doable without x, y, and z, prerequisites. Which required more knowledge and planning than the average gamer is used to expending in a video game (even back then).



And I think his point is that they will be left behind and not have much of a reason to be playing with others to begin with.

so, if i like to level and run instances and go very slow, I will be left behind and not have a reason to be playing with others? blizzard made group content for all levels, not just 60.

as far as the first part, the reason most players never got into naxx or aq40 is because they never hit 60. there is actually a stat bliz gave on this somewhere on % of active accounts with max level character at end-classic. Does anyone remember exactly what it was?

[Pejo]

You shouldn't be left behind, in the manner that there will always be some people in zones, unless you end up on a low pop realms. As long as Blizzard doesn't do a foolish decision such as keeping Vanilla population caps (2500-3500 players), there is a reduced risk of this.

They released that statistic during WotLK, and was the reason they did the Cata revamp. They stated that the majority of players never hit max ( > 50% ), and with their trial system, 70% of the trials never made it past 10. At this same time (11.5M subscribers), more people had quit WoW than were currently players, closer to 2.5x according to interview (approximately 17M people had quit WoW when we were at 11.5M subs)

[Deficineiron]

You shouldn't be left behind, in the manner that there will always be some people in zones, unless you end up on a low pop realms. As long as Blizzard doesn't do a foolish decision such as keeping Vanilla population caps (2500-3500 players), there is a reduced risk of this.

They released that statistic during WotLK, and was the reason they did the Cata revamp. They stated that the majority of players never hit max ( > 50% ), and with their trial system, 70% of the trials never made it past 10. At this same time (11.5M subscribers), more people had quit WoW than were currently players, closer to 2.5x according to interview (approximately 17M people had quit WoW when we were at 11.5M subs)

thank you for posting this.

assuming quit>active was a worldwide stat, it can be skewed by try-without-buy in china (half of wow's active population), but nonetheless the point remains. more interesting is how now they say 100m accounts have played wow.

[Eroginous]

thank you for posting this.

assuming quit>active was a worldwide stat, it can be skewed by try-without-buy in china (half of wow's active population), but nonetheless the point remains. more interesting is how now they say 100m accounts have played wow.

Well this goes back to my earlier point of subscriber numbers not being indicative of anything... except current subscriber count. Trying to read anything else from those metrics is kinda silly. And while the vast majority of the players in Vanilla never made it to the end game content, Vanilla was an entirely different product than any expansion that came afterward. It was released with intention of being a stand alone product with the option for additional content in the future, depending on how well launch went. It's massive success brought unique problems (server issues, client issues, unfinished content being pushed before it's ready, ect), and the devs spent a lot of time the first year just getting Classic to a stable, 'finished' place.

And then the end game became more about how well you could keep a 40 person raid group together than about how fun the adventure was. A lot of players who were in raid ready guilds ended up quitting over issues. They saw the release of new content before old content was even tuned right as a slight against the player base. If you think todays players whine too much, the first group of players to get to raid content were never happy. Ever. Nothing was developed right. Nothing was tuned right. Fights felt too hard and half the players in a raid were literally just providing buffs or marginal throughput on main class abilities. I never felt more underpowered than I did in classic. From broken rage regeneration mechanics to what felt like a lack of care for the quality of the content, People just weren't happy. It was hard to get raiders, keep raiders, and then TBC comes along to displace all the old raid content completely, making it pointless to even do unless you wanted something for nostalgic reasons.

This fractured the player base into a group that gets upset when the current content rotates, quitting, and then a group that comes with new content, always playing the latest and greatest. Thus, the cycling of subscribers.

[Uurdz]

Different people like different things.

Absolutely outrageous, I know.

Different strokes for different folks. I’ve even played with a guy who preferred using directional keys to move instead of WASD.

Seems to be a typical fallacy for this community where arbitrary disagreements evolve. I think a true statement is that the game had a lot to it and with so many people playing you could always find someone who shared the same niche enjoyments as you.

[plz delete account]

Do we have any speed run records from Vanilla, and will we start a new category of speed run records for Classic, or just use the same one as from 2004-2005?

[oplawlz]

Has nothing to do with liking different stuff. Your comment is also neither clever nor original, keep up the shitposting work.

It's very unlikely that the person I commented would find all his plans satisfying, judging by experience he'll get massively bored long before even hitting level cap, simply because WoW is neither new or shiny and his possible adventures will be extremely limited and cheapened by the fact most people would know everything in the game already.

But hey, it's better to waste your time I guess

You literally cannot "waste time" in a video game. It's a recreation, meaning as long as you're entertained you're spending your time as wisely as possible.

[arkanon]

You literally cannot "waste time" in a video game. It's a recreation, meaning as long as you're entertained you're spending your time as wisely as possible.

So you LITERALLY can waste time......by doing something you absolutely hate and dont find entertaining at all.

[voidillusion]

So you LITERALLY can waste time......by doing something you absolutely hate and dont find entertaining at all.

And why would you be playing a game that has components you hate and dont find entertaining?

[arkanon]

And why would you be playing a game that has components you hate and dont find entertaining?

I hate certain parts of MOST games i play.

[Projectmars]

Step #1 Spend a month or so before launch getting in touch with old (and new) friends and players and figure out things like which server and faction we're going to roll on. (And, because it's now, probably get some sort of facebook/scuttlebutt/whatever page set up. Maybe even do a mailing list, just for nostalgia feel.) Get vent/discord/mumble/whatever up and running.
Step #2 Avoid launch day. Form a guild, get folks on-board, and spend some time catching up on life while doing early quests or just hanging around IF, or wherever.
Step #2.5 Get folks' schedules figured out, deal with the inevitable bits of drama, see how big the guild is, maybe bring in some old/new blood.
Step #3 Level. Level slooow, because, even if I'm playing a lot, that'll still only be 10-20 hours per week (some weekends will be empty, so I'll probably binge every month or two, but most won't and life>>>WoW).
Step #4 Keep my crafting skills up as I level, which is going to make it even slower.
Step #5 Help friends, and random strangers, through group quests, elite areas, and dungeons (including organizing expeditions to dungeons in the first place).
Step #6 Eventually get to level cap in a year or two, and start working a little on gearing, sticking my nose into early endgame stuff, mostly just take it easy and fish and cook, maybe do a little working on my endgame crafting.

I became a running gag from leveling from 1 - 70 in about 7 months when TBC came out... Taking a year or two seems impossibly slow unless you play one or two hours a day, two or three days a week.

[Echocho]

Do we have any speed run records from Vanilla, and will we start a new category of speed run records for Classic, or just use the same one as from 2004-2005?

People didn't speed run back then because it's stupid.