"Who would actually pay for Classic?"

[chazus]

You guys are living in a dream if you think its going to be free.

Who said that? I don't think anyone thinks it's going to be totally free, or at least I haven't seen it asked/mentioned once before.

[Deleted]

I have never played Vanilla in a private server, but would instantly pay for blizzard-quality Vanilla servers. Why? Because private servers don't always work properly and there is a risk of them being shut down, meaning you lose all progress. The monthly payment in wow is anyway so low that I rather pay it than play a poorly executed version for free. Yes, this is anecdotal evidence but this same applies to all my irl's who still play wow; they are willing to pay for blizzard made Vanilla, but never even tried those free Vanilla servers.

Hell, I have always preferred monthly cost games over free ones, because too often free games have had excessive pay to win mechanics. Only recently it has become so that they make enough money by selling cosmetic items or something else useless that doesn't really affect the gameplay.

we have evidence that people will play on a vanilla server if it is free. We have zero evidence that anyone will pay for it. /end

Vanilla had quite a few subs in the past, which means that people have paid for it in the past. By applying your logic it seems that anything that isn't current is not evidence (which makes me think that you don't quite understand what evidence means).

If someone stole like a rare diamond today that hasn't been for sale in the past 3 years, we cannot by that imply that people want the diamond only if it's free, anyone that even tries to use logic would instead look at other things to determine whether someone would pay for that product or not. I think you weren't completely serious though because I want to believe that people aren't actually so stupid here.

[Aqua]

I think 'included with your sub' is a fair way to go about it, then those that play it exclusively are going to have to pay same as us, and those that are split get a fun extra side mission to enjoy for our financial support going toward this endeavour. It's fair.

[Gavll]

I don't know where this idea that anyone thinks it's going to be free is coming from? I'd be surprised if you can't get Classic on it's own at a reduced rate though. The whole point is that people who want to play Classic don't want to play retail (by and large).

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I think 'included with your sub' is a fair way to go about it, then those that play it exclusively are going to have to pay same as us, and those that are split get a fun extra side mission to enjoy for our financial support going toward this endeavour. It's fair.

I don't see that as fair at all. If Classic has the same sub cost as retail then it should get expansions and content updates too to make sure the sub fee is utilised. Which ain't gonna happen.

[Detheavn]

I paid for it once, don't see why I wouldn't pay for it again.
If it was included in the retail sub, it'd be a lot better, but even if it required a separate sub I'd do it.

[Nutri]

I'd buy it as an xpac - if not too expensive. I wouldn't want to have two subs running simultaneously for it tho.

[Arakkar]

I wouldn't mind a one-time purchase, or paying for a sub as long as it was linked to the standard WoW. I would however not be interested in maintaining 2 separate subs, nor in paying for a premium sub. I'll always choose standard over classic, so paying extra for the 'meh' periods doesn't really do it for me.

[chrisnumbers]

Thats evidence of someone CLAIMING they would pay for it.

To you. I know it's hard for you to believe but I don't need you to.

[Morbownz]

Cause maybe most of the private servers are full of people that for real cant afford the game?

I said this story many times before in the classic forums, i had a friend that literally played WoTLK server for a good 2.5 years, i think they must have been farming HC ICC and Hallion for 2 years or something stupid like that, he liked it, his problem, even after server shutdowns etc, i am not sure about the whole story.

99% of the people he played with were literally "Slav Rednecks" material that no way in hell can afford 13e/month, which for some of them it was something like 2-5 days of work depending on country i guess.

His words, not mine, it was generally <insert village here> from Poland/Russia/Romania/Ukraine/Balkans.

And in the US servers it was literally <Insert South America>.

That's an interesting statistic: 99% of all the people HE played with were "Slav Rednecks" and couldn't afford to pay for the game. Let's assume his entire guild were "Slav Rednecks" that could be a number between 30-50, of a server population of lets say 5 thousand. That's only 1% of the server population. Let's assume that every time he joined the LFD he declared himself a "Slav Redneck" and some of those people responded with "Me too, I'm glad this is free". We could be talking then about a number more like 250, which sounds damning but in reality it's still only 5% of the server population.

So you're statement "maybe most people of private servers are full of people that for real cant afford the game" doesn't sound... as water tight. Unless you consider a number like 5% FULL? I wonder if a barman served you 5% of a pint of Bud you'd consider it full? The only evidence that exists, and admittedly it's not concrete, is the HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of people that signed the letter Nostalrius sent to Blizzard stating they'd pay for an official Blizzard server.

[Alydael]

I would be willing to pay for it if it was a polished product.

It is impossible to tell if it would be worth it at the moment because they haven't given out a lot of details yet.

If it is just vanilla, exactly as it was- I probably wouldn't pay for it because I already played it. I would check it out if it was free.

I think it will come down to server communities. If you are on a server with a good community- vanilla will be fun. Without that- it will be dead (since there is no lfg, cross server, shards, etc).

It will be interesting to see if they have a plan to build those communities since it will be essential or if they are just going to leave it to chance.

I think Blizz should start building the server communities before the game even launches (maybe some kind of event) to generate excitement and get the communities going (plus to see what they have).

If they find a good way to build communities in classic, they might be able to use it to improve the servers on live.

[h4rr0d]

There weren't any hundreds of thousands of players on vanilla servers, unless you count all of them over the whole history. In that case, retail WoW has passed a long time ago the 100 million mark.

I think the questions is not if people will pay or not for vanilla, the question is how long they will pay for vanilla. And the answer for more than 90% is "not long". I've seen countless births and rebirths of private servers, they all start enthusiastic, plenty of people around you to play with and have fun and do those impossible group quests at any hour. Two months forward it's a wasteland, unless you start raiding seriously in some not so crappy guild, the game experience changes dramatically. And that's on a free private server, imagine paying 15 dollars per month to play a MMO virtually alone. That's why CRZ was invented and it was really a great idea, of course some people hate it, because their idea o playing WoW is to have all the mining nodes for themselves in an empty zone

I think people (or at least myself) had 2 major issues with CRZ:
PVP servers suddenly shifted balance (in case of realms like Neptulon EU, this was seriously glaring, when it went from 90% Alliance to something like 30% Alliance)
Low pop realms getting disadvantages of being on a high pop realm (mostly related to farming) while not getting any advantages (well supplied AH, plenty of guilds available for joining)

OT: When Classic is released, I'll definitely pay to play it for a while. How long that while is going to be depends on the implementation and population.

[Schmilblick]

I wont play it even for free.

[Guardian Bob]

Personally, I wouldn't want to pay a monthly fee to play a game I've owned for like what, 14 years? Private servers are free as well, and Blizzards version of Classic won't use the same addons and will have enough differences that it'll make the experience less than what it is on Private. The only benefit of having Blizzard manage it is that I can relay on not waking up one day and watching my character disappear because the private server failed to maintain.

[Mosotti]

Owning WoW does not mean you don't need to pay the subscription to play. The game comes with 30 days and then you need to pay.

Now I don't think they will charge separately for Classic, I think they will offer it together with retail or maybe as an option alone but at a lower price. I would go for full all in one though... That way they can have bored people trying the other version and maybe even like it.

As for addons, be sure it will have the same addons, even if they won't work completely at the start, there will be people to develop them pretty fast.

Also the best benefit of playing the genuine thing and not an EMULATION, is well, you're playing the real thing, not a bug infested fake version created based on old wiki articles and youtube videos.

[Deletedaccount1]

$15 per month to play WoW has always been a racket, but now it is honestly outrageous given how cheap or free most popular games have become. I think people would be willing to pay that fee but Blizzard should be charging less. Classic is too old to be worth that kind of money and retail is too devoid of content.

[Morbownz]

It was never about being damaging. It was about critizing someone who overexeggeration and has an inability to understand basic statistic or even opinions.

LOL. Jokes aside, there are no tangible stats you fucking lemon. There's only opinions from what seems to be 2 camps apposing each other constantly on every classic subject so it's hard to take either camp seriously. I refute plenty of opinions because there's strong counter arguments... you know like that big fucking petition that was signed by hundreds of thousands people currently playing on private servers that practically begged Blizzard to offer a service (for money) to allow access official Vanilla servers. Dunno, maybe my critical thinking skills are out of whack.

[Kathranis]

If you think it's going to be free, you're incredibly naive. What incentive would they have to spend time and money developing and maintaining a product that they get no financial gain from? It either has a sub fee or they sell in-game items and services, which nobody wants. So sub fee.

The most obvious option is to include it with a standard retail subscription. That's the method where they have the most to gain: they can boast higher MAUs playing WoW without having to worry about which version people are playing, they can have players freely crossing back and forth between the two, enticing Classic players to try the modern version of the game and giving some modern players another version of the game to mess around in. They can pace content progression so that lulls in one version are covered by new content in the other, keeping their MAUs higher overall. And they don't have to complicate matters by selling different versions of the same product; if you subscribe to WoW you get both. Simple as that. Don't even need to buy a battlechest, since the base game is free with subscription now.

They could sell it as a seperate subscription, but that is going to force a percentage of existing players to choose one or the other, and will dramatically diminish crossover potential, and there's no way Blizzard wants that. They want all of those players in the same bucket for the reasons I just outlined.


Also, good luck finding a populated private server after Blizzard has a competing product on the market. They're playing soft ball now, but you had better bet that they're going to get a lot more aggressive with their cease and desists once Classic launches.

[Druitz]

Not going to pat for wow demo

[Celarent]

I could see a tiered "early reserve" offer as a one-time purchase to help Blizzard gauge who's serious about playing, and plausibly restrict Week/Month One access since legacy content isn't the best candidate for ramped-up server capacity for traffic that won't be representative.

[Varvara Spiros Gelashvili]

LOL. Jokes aside, there are no tangible stats you fucking lemon. There's only opinions from what seems to be 2 camps apposing each other constantly on every classic subject so it's hard to take either camp seriously. I refute plenty of opinions because there's strong counter arguments... you know like that big fucking petition that was signed by hundreds of thousands people currently playing on private servers that practically begged Blizzard to offer a service (for money) to allow access official Vanilla servers. Dunno, maybe my critical thinking skills are out of whack.

There are private servers take them and blizzard does internal polling. Blizzard verifies accounts though and I was criticing you for being unable to understand the two. Your still failing to grasp that.