Classic World of Warcraft Discussion [Megathread]

[Beazy]

Blizzard wrote the playbook. It's only a "logistical headache" for forum-dwellers trying to play fantasy football with Blizzard's finances. The "logistical headache" is doing it all for free with none of Blizzard's resources like how Nostalrius did it.

Perfect example:

What investments do you propose Blizzard make to return a overall 5% increase in Hearthstone revenue? Are the 100000 twitch ads not working? Are they going to magically tap into a demographic that has yet to find out that they like card games?

.....

Can we get back to reality yet? Absolutely ridiculous.

The reality, adding 10 people to the hearthstone team could increase revenue by simply adding cards to the game. Its been proven that hearthstone revenue was around 20 million a month and releasing content/cards has increased revenue, in some cases, by 100%.

https://www.google.com/search?q=hear...hrome&ie=UTF-8




I don't think we know enough about how a legacy server with a monthly sub would turn out to make the case that money could be made here and more of it. Adding team members to hearthstone, to increase the content provided is a direct return on investment vs a legacy servers which is up in the air.

But please, tell me more about "reality".

[Deficineiron]

I can't find the actual quote which might have shed some light on the figure. Looking at the Statement of Operations you linked I wonder if WoW's development is separated and included the MMORPG line. Either way the figures reported are at odds with the figure mentioned in the call.

I've had a quick scan through the notes and I cannot find what exactly is included in the MMORPG line.

speculatoin here but since 4 types of cost of sales categories are broken out (assume this encompasses all sales), then product development is a single line-item below, that product development isn't in that CoS number. also had not noticed marketing is broken out along with sg&a.

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I don't think we know enough about how a legacy server with a monthly sub would turn out to make the case that money could be made here and more of it. Adding team members to hearthstone, to increase the content provided is a direct return on investment vs a legacy servers which is up in the air.

But please, tell me more about "reality".

A helpful tidbit would be to include some dismissal of the RSos question - (they apparently make money on this). Wow had many multiples more subs than RS ever did so there has to be an angle to show how it would cost too much to do legacy compared to RSos.

The 'we cannot know' approach isn't as convincing. Even the 100x revenue claims worked better. (I suggest inverting them, say legacy at 100m run rate would only do 1% of blizz revenue, it sounds like a bigger difference. I won't say anything this time

[Sturmbringe]

I am sure Blizzard would greatly appreciate some lessons on how to manage their company, not to say anything about managing their stock, from our friend the Dallas cowboy above.

He seems to have it all figured out. At this point, I find myself asking why Blizzard even bother to hire accountants and not just hire Beazy to show them how to do the math.

I can even see it in front of me, some guy with a George W. Bush type accent, sitting at the top of the table in Blizzard HQ conference room telling them "Fellas, you'r' doin't wrawng".

INFRACTION

[Deficineiron]

I am sure Blizzard would greatly appreciate some lessons on how to manage their company, not to say anything about managing their stock, from our friend the Dallas cowboy above.

He seems to have it all figured out. At this point, I find myself asking why Blizzard even bother to hire accountants and not just hire Beazy to show them how to do the math.

I can even see it in front of me, some guy with a George W. Bush type accent, sitting at the top of the table in Blizzard HQ conference room telling them "Fellas, you'r' doin't wrawng".

He is demonstrably wrong about a number of thing but you are far worse for personal attacks.

[Beazy]

A helpful tidbit would be to include some dismissal of the RSos question - (they apparently make money on this). Wow had many multiples more subs than RS ever did so there has to be an angle to show how it would cost too much to do legacy compared to RSos.

Its not even an argument, Old School Runescape will/does get updates, aka reasons to stay subbed after X amount of time.

Legacy WoW servers wouldnt get updates and would remain .12 forever.

[Eleccybubb]

He is demonstrably wrong about a number of thing but you are far worse for personal attacks.

All he does recently in the Nost or any classic related thread is bash retailers.

[Beazy]

I am sure Blizzard would greatly appreciate some lessons on how to manage their company, not to say anything about managing their stock, from our friend the Dallas cowboy above.

He seems to have it all figured out. At this point, I find myself asking why Blizzard even bother to hire accountants and not just hire Beazy to show them how to do the math.

I can even see it in front of me, some guy with a George W. Bush type accent, sitting at the top of the table in Blizzard HQ conference room telling them "Fellas, you'r' doin't wrawng".

/facepalm

You cant even be condescending right. . . . . in Texas its "Fellas, yer dewin` it wrong".... Get your state bashing game on point son.

INFRACTION

[Deficineiron]

Its not even an argument, Old School Runescape will/does get updates, aka reasons to stay subbed after X amount of time.

Legacy WoW servers wouldnt get updates and would remain .12 forever.

From a business viewpoint, if the legacy project was successful by internal metrics, wouldn't it make sense to consider moving on to a bc project after x years?

There is a lot of speculation here but given that blizzard has not said anything definitive at all, it certainly isn't an excluded possibility. heck, we don't even know if they would be 1.12 genuines or frankensteins.

but to play the forum thread game, can you please post a link to where any longer-term progression rollout of expansions is precluded by blizzard who hasn't even said they are doing legacy?

[Beazy]

From a business viewpoint, if the legacy project was successful by internal metrics, wouldn't it make sense to consider moving on to a bc project after x years?

No idea, are you suggesting making a legacy server, then in say ~ 2 years adding BC 1.0 content to the game? wouldn't that piss off half the player base who wants to continue raiding AQ40? I don't think the argument for legacy servers has ever been, "lets go back to Vanilla, and slowly progress through LK", its always been, from day one "VANILLA IS BEST WOW, WE WANT BEST WOW".

[Deficineiron]

No idea, are you suggesting making a legacy server, then in say ~ 2 years adding BC 1.0 content to the game? wouldn't that piss off half the player base who wants to continue raiding AQ40? I don't think the argument for legacy servers has ever been, "lets go back to Vanilla, and slowly progress through LK", its always been, from day one "VANILLA IS BEST WOW, WE WANT BEST WOW".

the blizzard argument would be money. i have no idea how to characterize the legacy 'argument' you claim exists. reading this thread, i haven't found a cohesive argument. there seem to be people who want to play classic or any early version wow (pre-4.x) with a large varied set of caveats, provisional clauses, and exception-statements.

[Saracens]

Keep the discussion going on the topic at hand and NOT the users within the thread. Please, and thank you.

[Deficineiron]

There is no cohesive argument for legacy servers other then want, same way it was 1200 pages ago.

a smart video game company pays attention to 'want' from gamers, and takes it into account when making business decisions. Blizzard itself has done this - there was such overwhelming demand for pandas in-game that they added them ('because the players wanted it.')

there is clearly demand for older-version wow. Given a choice I would expect a broad division of preference between classic, bc and wotlk. given no choice, many of all groups would be happy with classic as that seems to be where the talk is.

[Veggie50]

I've said it before and I'll say it again... Apart from the hardcore vanilla crowd, Blizzard can hit a right note with this for a looooot of people who get burned out on current content, allowing them to take a vacation in a less fast paced version. If they link up legacy servers of every expansion, you give players the ability to move through expansions at the original progression, without long intervals of content droughts.

[Deficineiron]

I have nothing against legacy servers, shit I have tried a wotlk one. The problem is no one know what the demand for legacy servers are. Now toss in all of the work blizzard has to do and the pandora's box it opens, reasonable people can see that its not some simple process that can be done in a week. Could they open them at some point, sure. To think its going to happen anytime soon is wishful thinking, at best.

no one on this thread knows demand, but blizzard may actually have some idea, and they certainly have more idea than you or me (or anyone here ) also if they choose to they may well know more about other legacy mmo projects that has been posted here.

Do you not believe blizzard has more information than you or other posters about how such servers might expect to perform within various permutations/qualifiers?

I have not seen the expectation that it would take a week to put out legacy servers. I would think a year is a good starting point. Where did you see a week? if a week is 'soon' to you then it most certainly is wishful. within 2-3 years? I would be much more skeptical of 'wishful thinking' claims vs that number.

[Mahourai]

no one on this thread knows demand, but blizzard may actually have some idea

I'm sure they do - which is why official legacy servers do not exist.

[Deficineiron]

I'm sure they do - which is why official legacy servers do not exist.

they likely do have some idea. However, you seem to have a rather idealistic notion of how fortune 500 companies make decisions and work in general. They may not have even made a final decision either way yet.

[Pejo]

I think we should be looking at what Blizzard could do to solve some of the technical problems they're going to run into. One of these issues is how to deal with the population for the legacy server. Let's talk about what this could look like, using some of the numbers people have thrown out in this thread.

Let's say 1M people across NA/EU decide to play, and let's assume they make servers in NA and EU to keep them separate like they are currently (where PS are worldwide). There are three scenarios we want to look at (I won't add timeframes because they're variable and it's not about when these scenarios will occur):
- Initial launch. There will be a huge spike on interest (more than what will actually play long term on the server, or subscribe). This can be seen at any expansion launch.
- Population is stable. This is where the servers are pretty set, certain number of people play at peak, etc.
- When population starts to decrease, and you end up with low population servers.

With original WoW servers, the servers were capped at 5K but let's assume they spend engineering time to increase these caps to 15K or so. The reason they are currently able to go high is due to phasing/virtualization of realms. Is this something we want to allow on the Vanilla servers to allow for that? This is not a Vanilla experience and can lead to you not seeing people that you expect to see, even if they go with their current instances implementation. Do we expect players to wait in hour long queues? Do we open more servers? If we open more servers and servers decrease to low population, do we connect legacy realms? Once again, this is against the Vanilla experience since your community is changing now. Maybe you liked low population. To deal with PVP battleground queues, do we do crossrealm queues once they become low population, or queues reach a certain wait time?

This is only one of the technical issues they will run into (most of this is the business decisions, not even the engineering involved) - what are peoples' thoughts?

[Deficineiron]

Of course, and following that line of thought why do you think there are no legacy servers?

Bold part, you missed a lot of this thread I take it. Dont you know that blizzard has the code and its nothing for them to make a legacy server? its only been repeated 14 million times by the vanilla fanatics.

re the code - some folks (were you one?) claimed the code was gone. others said silly, there are secure version backups, thirds chimed in that even that gets lost 9apparently it can).

it seems they DO have code still, but don't have metadata.

the legacy issue is still fairly new post-nost. you seem to operate on short time-frames but check back in 2 years and see what has developed.

YOu seem to be thinking blizzard is a group of guys in a garage that can make decisions on a whim. I would think that ANY major decision would actually have a massive amount of pre-invesstigation, market study, cya paperwork, etc. before it gets greenlighted IF it does, IF mgmt wants to investigate it. On top of that, a major development project might need greenlighting from the folks that manage the money (a/b).

they may well say a definitive NO at blizzcon, but until then it seems to be an open question. They may also make a much less definitive 'not now' at blizzcon, which would be smarter even if their real answer is no. They might also say something else instead.

[Sabever]

There is no cohesive argument for legacy servers other then want, same way it was 1200 pages ago.

Actually there is no cohesive argument against legacy servers other than people not wanting them. Cohesive implies cohesion or that it is wrapped into one. There have been dozens of solid reasons both financially, and for the longevity of WoW that have clearly been cohesive.

The only argument against Legacy that has come close to being cohesive was cohesive because it was fallicious.

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Of course, and following that line of thought why do you think there are no legacy servers?

Bold part, you missed a lot of this thread I take it. Dont you know that blizzard has the code and its nothing for them to make a legacy server? its only been repeated 14 million times by the vanilla fanatics.

This is an example of a post that lacks cohesion. That or you are using words that you do not know the meaning to.

[Kyanion]

Actually there is no cohesive argument against legacy servers other than people not wanting them. Cohesive implies cohesion or that it is wrapped into one. There have been dozens of solid reasons both financially, and for the longevity of WoW that have clearly been cohesive.

The only argument against Legacy that has come close to being cohesive was cohesive because it was fallicious.

Bzzt wrong, plenty of strong arguments against Legacy. One that it could harm retail if it flops by diverting money/resources/people away to other projects because Legacy turns into a dumpster fire. It could also fragment the player base and harm BOTH versions of the game. It could be a problem because they are competing with their own MMO. It could be a total disaster in player relations because once Legacy is announced then the arguments start for what players want in Vanilla because I'm sorry they are NOT unified on what the fuck they want. They assume VanillaLite aka Nost is the correct Vanilla but starting on 1.12 just trivializes many aspects of the game and makes raids like MC/BWL a walk in the park which they were not in true Vanilla.

Some of us want WoW to stay focused on retail and only handle that, it is what we want to see manpower/money/resources focused on. Some Legacy fanatics are pissed at that, but let's be real, some of them haven't spent a penny on Blizzard games in years because of their hatred for retail, so who gives a shit if a non-paying player does not get what they want.

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Sure thing alt account.

Don't worry, there are no arguments against Legacy, period. This is just an echo chamber for Legacy fans only.

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a smart video game company pays attention to 'want' from gamers, and takes it into account when making business decisions. Blizzard itself has done this - there was such overwhelming demand for pandas in-game that they added them ('because the players wanted it.')

there is clearly demand for older-version wow. Given a choice I would expect a broad division of preference between classic, bc and wotlk. given no choice, many of all groups would be happy with classic as that seems to be where the talk is.

And they'll continue to be smart if Legacy gets denied again at Blizzcon. Also, not every video game company that pays attention to 'want' from gamers is smart. Sometimes the community does not really know what the fuck they want and the demands they make ruin games.

There is clearly a demand for people playing on free private servers, you are right about that. Does not mean Blizzard needs to make Legacy a thing right now. But hey they are the smart ones and for many years they have said no.