What if it fails?

[Deleted]

Private servers are free, often have cheats.

None of the bigger private vanilla servers have cheats :/

[klaps_05]

It cant fail because its a pet project by blizzard for the dedicated vanilla fans. There is no benchmark it needs to hit. Classic can have 1 million players or 10 players, its there, its available to everyone. Think of it as the singleplayer games you have bought before, but instead its an MMO.

[Eapoe]

As someone who is not particularly interested in Classic I don’t think it will fail.
To answer the OP, if it does there will be plenty of people who state “I told you so!” as well as people who state “Blizz screwed up Classic and if they hadn’t done ‘X’ it would have been fine!”

[Millyraynge]

It will be succesful though. There are so many playing on private servers currently that will join up, that it wont be a problem.

And it will run on the same subscription, so money isn't really an issue to keep it running. It will in fact most likely add more subscriptions than without Classic.


I honestly can't see it fail as it is now. However, when Naxx is cleared it will die off if they don't restart servers (like some private servers do), or expand to TBC.

People from private servers will most likely not playing classic. There is absolutely no point to do so. Sure, maybe some points may be different from both private and classic, but the overall experience is more or less the same. I would wonder to play classic again after years of playing vanilla on private. Most of the hype comes from players which didn't experienced a private server. A lot of influencers already start to brainwash people to make them believe that the most annoying parts of vanilla are the best. The best parts of vanilla starting with the Endgame. Since the elitism will be brought to Vanilla through the mindset of the modern player, you need to be very fast endgame ready to keep up. You need to know all about theory crafting, even if it's meaningless, only to make you worth enough to stay with all the other worthy people. This matters for both PvE and PvP. Why do you guys believe people will change while playing classic. Classic is the mother of that kind of achievement: you want to be the first with specific items and you want to be the first killing specific bosses. Once everyone has achieved the same goal, you aren't the special snowflake anymore. This is also the main motivator: to have the opportunity to be a special snowflake without being a part of a world first guild.

[Onikaroshi]

Personally will fail for me unless they do decide to go through with progression. Vanilla was fun at the time but TBC/Wrath all the way to MoP were better experiences in my eyes. Most of the mop classes (the way they played) plus talent trees like the prior expansions would make the best version of the game imo.

[Cathululock]

It won't. I guarantee it will break so many records and re-shake the MMO industry--showing investors that there is a place for this kind of game.

The EQ classic servers are the only thing keeping that game going, and they didn't put 1/100th of the effort into them that Blizzard is into this.

[McNeil]

These ''will Classic fail?'' threads are so tiresome. We haven't even defined what would make Classic fail, one would say that having 250.000 active players is a huge succes while another will say its a huge failure. And I don't get why people often keep bringing this ''the game will see a huge drop in activity'' after its release, while this is a normal case with like EVERY video game out there. I'm very much sure that BFA has lost like 75% of its players since launch at this point, yet these same people rather pretend that BFA is doing more than fine as if these drops never happened. Just look at the latest quarterly reports that indicates that the game is doing about as well as the end of Legion...... the END of Legion.

As for Classic I'm sure that it'll do fine. People from private servers, big streamers and a huge chunk of BFA will be checking it out and may play it when they get tired of BFA during down time or something. Most people already know what to expect from Classic and whether they will stick around or not, but it also heavily depends if they will get people they know to stick around aswell. If anything, Classic is what WoW needed for that extra life energy, because it will feel ''newer'' to a lot of players who play BFA as a close copy of Legion that follows the exact same formula. Classic is a different game that appeals to a different audience.

[Molis]

Three things will happen:

Current retail players will try it out realize it should have been left in the past and go back to retail.
The shitty PS crowd will try it realize it is not free and you cant P2W and go back to PS.
There is a true core of maybe 100,000 players that will keept playing it and that may or may not be enough to keep it afloat.

[ashblond]

The servers will be dead after 3 months. I would consider it a success if it can have 100K+ active players.

[Onikaroshi]

Three things will happen:

Current retail players will try it out realize it should have been left in the past and go back to retail.
The shitty PS crowd will try it realize it is not free and you cant P2W and go back to PS.
There is a true core of maybe 100,000 players that will keept playing it and that may or may not be enough to keep it afloat.

Thing is, since it's tied to a standard sub, Blizzard can just be like "it's totally working guys! we didn't waste all that time!" and we wouldn't know.

[melodramocracy]

Depends on how you judge failure. Detractors will label it a failure once the initial tide of interest in it dwindles off (and that will inevitably happen). From Blizzards point of view, if it even provides a meager spike in subs it will be a success, as it is content that won't need updating once it's live.

[MoanaLisa]

Is there healthy private servers which worked for years? Like 5+ years at least. Where people still regularly raid Naxx, etc. I have an impression that private server life is short and private server people just level, finish content and jump onto next server. But I don't have hard data about it. What do you think?

I think that we're not here to discuss private servers as I have stated before in this very thread. Please do not do so. Continue to keep the focus on WoW Classic. Thanks.

[sam86]

define fail, if by fail u mean they won't play it for 2 years then it will fail
but nostalgia market is strong and doesn't fail at all, unless they f8ck up like silent hill remaster collection, chance they fail is very slim to none, nostalgia SELLS and has been proven 1502 time already, ppl are tired from new products that sucks and prefer to buy old trusted products, most new games end like no man sky, there are sh8tload of new games that come out daily (u can see that on steam), yet very few named are good, ppl prefer - a lot - to invest in products they know are great and working even if 10 years old than new ones

If blizz plan is to see classic rule for 2 years then activision greed as usual is willing to f8ck entire video game industry for few bucks

[Eon Drache]

Need proof there is a market for a "classic" version of the game? Old School Runescape is the more popular of the two.

Old School Runescape is getting updates and is being maintained constantly. Vanilla Classic would be equivalent to Runescape Classic. In which, Runescape classic was shut down last August.

However, I don't think Classic WoW will fail. It will only need a few thousand people to keep it going and at $15 a month it will probably pay for itself within the first year to keep it up a while even if the servers do die down. The chances of Classic failing financially are extremely slim. About as slim as saying BFA will shut down next week.

[grexly75]

It can't fail. It just can't.

Simple answer: Classic Vanilla private servers have been successful since, as early as, 2005. Indeed, early ones were built on the Mangos engine and later on most of them were based on TrinityCore. Nevertheless, point is, they've been successful since essentially the beginning of WoW, and they haven't "failed" until now. Blizzard knows this very well, and thus that's the reason they're doing this too now.

Now you have to ask yourself the question successful how? Successful that was a cobbled together version of the original game or successful because one didn't have to pay for it..

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Old School Runescape is getting updates and is being maintained constantly. Vanilla Classic would be equivalent to Runescape Classic. In which, Runescape classic was shut down last August.

However, I don't think Classic WoW will fail. It will only need a few thousand people to keep it going and at $15 a month it will probably pay for itself within the first year to keep it up a while even if the servers do die down. The chances of Classic failing financially are extremely slim. About as slim as saying BFA will shut down next week.

Well you have to consider that classic will be piggybacking on retails sub fees, so those that will play retail only will be paying for classic and vice versa those who only want to pay classic will be paying for retails updates.. One of the ways that classic will likely fail is if the outgoing costs for classic outweigh what Blizzard have incoming..

[Eon Drache]

Now you have to ask yourself the question successful how? Successful that was a cobbled together version of the original game or successful because one didn't have to pay for it..

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Well you have to consider that classic will be piggybacking on retails sub fees, so those that will play retail only will be paying for classic and vice versa those who only want to pay classic will be paying for retails updates.. One of the ways that classic will likely fail is if the outgoing costs for classic outweigh what Blizzard have incoming..

I did. I said that the $15 a month for classic will probably be enough to keep classic up for a long time even if the playerbase for classic dies. Classic servers will be extremely cheap to maintain. The big part of it will be paying for the development of it rather than keeping the servers up.

[Slyme]

I think the most fair question to ask is for how long will the community stay alive at all until it withers out and dies because Classic is finite content, unless they actually decide to do TBC but i doubt that..

[Hey There Guys its Metro]

That's the thing. It WILL fail. Eventually.
Its just a matter of time.
If its 2 years, well maybe that's considered a success, but eventually once all the content is out, then what?

You will not keep serious players playing the game without new end game content coming out, and you wont attract any method-level guilds to a product where all the learning was done over a decade ago, so things like the MDI and World First streams wont keep new hype being built for the game.

That's my biggest concern for this. I feel like after a year or so, it will be guilds / communities that keep to themselves like live, and just a bunch of noobs running around.

There doesn't seem like there will be any competitive cross-guild scene, like you might have in M+, and once those guilds eventually break up due to no new content, what's left for the game?

I know it seems like its a long ways away, but so is 9.0 and I'm sure Blizzard is already working on that.

[Deleted]

That's the thing. It WILL fail. Eventually.
Its just a matter of time.
If its 2 years, well maybe that's considered a success, but eventually once all the content is out, then what?

You will not keep serious players playing the game without new end game content coming out, and you wont attract any method-level guilds to a product where all the learning was done over a decade ago, so things like the MDI and World First streams wont keep new hype being built for the game.

That's my biggest concern for this. I feel like after a year or so, it will be guilds / communities that keep to themselves like live, and just a bunch of noobs running around.

There doesn't seem like there will be any competitive cross-guild scene, like you might have in M+, and once those guilds eventually break up due to no new content, what's left for the game?

I know it seems like its a long ways away, but so is 9.0 and I'm sure Blizzard is already working on that.

Think you are using the word fail wrong in this context

[anon5123]

Uh...

we go back to playing private servers like we have for the past 10 years. The server cores aren't just going to disappear because Classic launches.

Next thread.

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I think the most fair question to ask is for how long will the community stay alive at all until it withers out and dies because Classic is finite content, unless they actually decide to do TBC but i doubt that..

If its 2 years, well maybe that's considered a success, but eventually once all the content is out, then what?

You will not keep serious players playing the game without new end game content coming out

If you actually played private servers, you'd know that once a server hits Naxx, a new one launches at MC/Ony patch.

Just...so many people just like you, "HURR GAME IS GONNA DIE ONCE IT HITS NAXX XDDDDD", completely ignorant to the history of vanilla pservers.