How big is WoW classic going to be? Are the retail devs worried about their jobs?

[Dylamoo]

why would any engineer worry about their jobs for development of video games? Vanilla isn't a whole new coding language for those retail devs to worry about, if anything they'll be moved to the retail team if the demand requires it. That being said, classic will be huge for the first i'd say 5 months and i'm being quite generous. It'll attract the people who loved that aspect of vanilla, but the fact is most of those people have moved on with their lives and cannot play the game they love in the way they used to do it. I'm hoping it stays huge for at least a year but i highly doubt it. It'll certainly have more attendance than retail does though for a year i think.

[Ulfric Trumpcloak]

Bigger than retail at launch. Down to 100-200k players after that.

[Fascinate]

why would any engineer worry about their jobs for development of video games? Vanilla isn't a whole new coding language for those retail devs to worry about, if anything they'll be moved to the retail team if the demand requires it. That being said, classic will be huge for the first i'd say 5 months and i'm being quite generous. It'll attract the people who loved that aspect of vanilla, but the fact is most of those people have moved on with their lives and cannot play the game they love in the way they used to do it. I'm hoping it stays huge for at least a year but i highly doubt it. It'll certainly have more attendance than retail does though for a year i think.

I never said anything about engineers, talking about creative types that are currently working on WoW bfa.

[Donald Hellscream]

I fail to see how the success of classic could in any way make retail devs worried about their job.
Its not like they are gonna go into the office and pick out random people to can because of it and anyone who thinks this will be the case is being delusional.

[Fascinate]

Announcement for classic wow got 23.3k likes. The recent announcement for classic wow release date and sub requirement got 8.9k likes.

You missed the point i was making, now go ahead and look at those twitter replies one by one and im sure you would be surprised by the ages of the people liking it as well as thier wow history. I never said these people will be a majority, but they surely wont be an insignificant number either. This really hinges on how much marketing blizzard does for classic, which we have no idea on yet.

[ashblond]

You only have to go as fa as twitter to see what im talking about here, when WoW classic was announced people went absolutely nuts! And these are the same people who have quit WoW a loooonnnngg time ago. The hype is only gonna keep growing as we get closer to launch, and if blizzard decides to put real money into marketing this....oh man the numbers classic hits i couldnt even predict.

People go nuts or hyped doesn't mean anything. Fans were very hyped about blizzcon and then indeed went nuts when they anounced D3 mobile.

The game was excellent in a standard of 14 years ago. But the market was much different back then. It was pretty much the only big game.
There was no LOL, no DOTA, no Overwatch, no HotS, etc... And there was no Netflix, no Twitch, not even Youtube 14 years ago.
In summery, it was popular because it was good game, and people had no other choices.

In today's standard, Classic is trash, and people have many other choices.

[Fascinate]

I fail to see how the success of classic could in any way make retail devs worried about their job.
Its not like they are gonna go into the office and pick out random people to can because of it and anyone who thinks this will be the case is being delusional.

In my estimation WoW classic is going to far eclipse the popularity of retail WoW based on its core design mechanics, i am simply posing the question in this thread if the current WoW devs would be worried about their job security at blizzard entertainment because WoW classic isnt like other games where there is ongoing development (and where you would move people from team to team based on need/popularity), the game has been made and the challenges for the team are all technical based ones.

[Vineri]

why would any engineer worry about their jobs for development of video games? Vanilla isn't a whole new coding language for those retail devs to worry about, if anything they'll be moved to the retail team if the demand requires it.

The base code is Legions, not far from BFA (imo). The attempt is to shoehorn Vanilla into Legions.

At the end of the day, the devs who do this have better job placement than any current devs. They learned the system, incorporated new code, modified, tested said code, and TBH worked under a strict timeline and a tremendous level of stress.

It should put the current team to shame.

Upon successful delivery, of course.

[McFuu]

200K is very optimistic. I would consider Classic a success if it can maintain 100K active players.

If it can sustain that after 12 months it would be a very good success. Turning this into a competition with current WoW is pointless and a waste of time. You are correct: Blizzard will never say either way.

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No, not even a tiny bit. You underestimate the flexibility of developers.

I really think just the existence is a huge success.

As for the 100k to 200k, I think it's about right, that includes people that come over from private servers and includes those who are playing from current and recent subs.
I believe the vast majority of reported private server population is all the same population, ie of one server says they have 130k active accounts, another server with 10k active accounts is probably 90% of the same community. It's also multiple multibox accounts too. So... It seems reasonable 100-200k.

[Fascinate]

Oh mcfuu is one of those guys, the people using pirate server numbers to draw conclusions about official servers ran by blizzard entertainment.

Kinda wild having conversations on the internet, never know what your gonna get!

[grexly75]

Listen, nostalgia is a motherfucker.

For people like me who have been there in classic, it will never be as good as it was. Ever.

“It’s exactly what I want in a mmorpg! I’m totally ready!” That’s cute. You’ll stop sooner than you think.

For people who never played classic...

LOL. You really have no idea what you’re in for. It is such a simple and bland game compared to even BfA.

The only thing great about Classic is the community. Your reputation mattered. People generally behaved better. It was nice. Other than that, boring. There was a severe bloat of spells and abilities. During a raid, as a frost Mage for example, you basically just frostbolted the whole time with the occasional decurse. You had spells up the ass and barely used 2-3.

That’s so fun!! (Eye roll)

Pretty much and with the Go Go Go mentality of a fair portion of players, they will get a rude shock when they find out how slow and grindy it was back then..

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There will be new content for BfA and future expansions. Good luck raiding Naxx over and over and over and over and over and over and over again for the next 10 years in Classic. I hear putting together and maintaining a 40 man raid group is real easy.

Exactly and not to forget that in retail right now some guilds are having a time trying to get 10, 15 or 20 players to raid.. Trying to get 40 together who know what they have to do are geared correctly, and have all their pots and what not ready it will be very interesting indeed to see what happens..

[ashblond]

Oh mcfuu is one of those guys, the people using pirate server numbers to draw conclusions about official servers ran by blizzard entertainment.

Kinda wild having conversations on the internet, never know what your gonna get!

Blizzard set up 20 servers during Blizzcon to run the Classic demo and limited each play session to 60 minutes with a 30 minute cooldown.

It was planned to limit over population for server capacity. But in fact, during the demo period, there was 1 server at High pop, 3 at Medium while 16 servers at Low pop. so the 60 mins session limit was quickly removed.

Ofc demo version is not complete version of classic, and it can't approve much. But at least it shows there weren't as many enthusiastic classic fans as Blizzard expected.

When Classic launches, I won't be surprised if there will be over millions of players in the 1st weeks. And after 3 months, 100K active players is a very realistic estimation.

[Mashanerz]

It's gonna be a flop.

As people play it they're going to be upset about the quality of life improvements that didn't exist back then. I think you'll end up with a couple of guilds pushing content in it, but it probably won't be sustainable and they'll be attempting to cannibalize each other.

[Fascinate]

Blizzard set up 20 servers during Blizzcon to run the Classic demo and limited each play session to 60 minutes with a 30 minute cooldown.

It was planned to limit over population for server capacity. But in fact, during the demo period, there was 1 server at High pop, 3 at Medium while 16 servers at Low pop. so the 60 mins session limit was quickly removed.

Ofc demo version is not complete version of classic, and it can't approve much. But at least it shows there weren't as many enthusiastic classic fans as Blizzard expected.

If you legitimately are using the classic demo as a gauge for how popular WoW classic will be i dont think we can continue any sort of conversation past this point lol. I am a HUGE fan of classic and not even i bought the demo, it was a 4 level FIFTY DOLLAR status update that is going to look nothing like the actual classic release will.

That logic is just as bad as the guy using pirate server populations to guess how popular classic is going to be, i shouldnt have to explain why either.

[Voltsmasher]

Classic isn't going to knock the socks off of anyone who is playing retail.

It will be enjoyable for a bit for many and I'm sure there is a good following of former hardcore players that will keep it alive. However, the thought that classic would create a divide as you state is just overly dramatic.

I think you will end up being right about twitch if only because the leveling experience is a longer journey that can be capitalized in

[ashblond]

If you legitimately are using the classic demo as a gauge for how popular WoW classic will be i dont think we can continue any sort of conversation past this point lol. I am a HUGE fan of classic and not even i bought the demo, it was a 4 level FIFTY DOLLAR status update that is going to look nothing like the actual classic release will.

That logic is just as bad as the guy using pirate server populations to guess how popular classic is going to be, i shouldnt have to explain why either.

As people have pointed out, classic itself is already a success when people still likes it and blizzard decides to make classic servers.

How big it can be? If it can maintain 100K active players after 3 months, it is already a big success.

And you are right, there is no point to continue conversation with people who thinks Classic will have millions of active players or bigger than retail...

[Vineri]

Blizzard set up 20 servers during Blizzcon to run the Classic demo and limited each play session to 60 minutes with a 30 minute cooldown.

It was planned to limit over population for server capacity. But in fact, during the demo period, there was 1 server at High pop, 3 at Medium while 16 servers at Low pop. so the 60 mins session limit was quickly removed.

Ofc demo version is not complete version of classic, and it can't approve much. But at least it shows there weren't as many enthusiastic classic fans as Blizzard expected.

When Classic launches, I won't be surprised if there will be over millions of players in the 1st weeks. And after 3 months, 100K active players is a very realistic estimation.

I'm not sure which planet you come from, but I'm not paying hard earned money on a demo. And Blizzcon is just a paid advertisement I'd rather not participate in.

The people who played either were super duper excited or had an excess of disposable income.

Are the population data points you gave really fact? Seems like phasing took over low pop servers.

[ashblond]

I'm not sure which planet you come from, but I'm not paying hard earned money on a demo. And Blizzcon is just a paid advertisement I'd rather not participate in.

The people who played either were super duper excited or had an excess of disposable income.

Are the population data points you gave really fact? Seems like phasing took over low pop servers.

I am from planet earth.

[Fascinate]

People are just unable to grasp the scope of classic until it gets closer. Once june is here and we start seeing advertisements for classic launch they just might then understand how big of a deal its going to be, it will be THE gaming event of the past decade and its something no one is going to want to miss. This is why i have changed my stance on sharding, the amount of people that are showing up launch day is going to surprise everyone, probably even myself with the lofty expectations i have.

[Vineri]

I am from planet earth.

Most people on this planet are not going to pay to play a temporary demo. On an MMORPG, where progress is not saved.

Or did you think all PC owners were wealthy? Without mortgages, families, tuition, plus basic life expenses.

Gauging Classic's success on Blizzcon tickets sold is .. silly.