I think its partly fear of missing out. Blizzard has two options for a BC release. Either they progress classic realms to the BC expansion. Or they launch a third version of wow, further fragmenting their player base. Personally I would like a standalone BC with the option of copying your characters one-way to the BC realms from the classic realms. That way we will always have Classic, instead of losing classic in 2 years, assuming the phases roll out roughly every 4 months, which isn't to much of a stretch.
If they go the split route, I would like to see a Legacy Realms subscription. That way, those games can get the support they need without burdening retail.
I say they will announce it at Blizzcon next year. The WoW plate is already more then full with the next expansion.
Maybe they will give us the phase release schedule of Classic, that would be nice. As an Alliance on Herod, im a bit afraid of what the world will look like during phase 2 with honor but no BG. I really hope it wont last more then 4-6 weeks.
OP, what you're talking about is a progression server. If Blizz wants to be smart, what they would do is release the progression server independently of the Classic server and just give people the ability to copy their characters over from Classic. Win-win, the Classic experience is left untouched and BC can happen as intended while people aren't having to level through vanilla content over and over.
What is wrong with keeping Classic as it is forever? Some of the private servers had been around for 15 years. Just keep it vanilla. If people rush to 60, get BiS within 3 weeks that is their problem.
TBC is NOT classic, the design is different. I play classic for the design, TBC would ruin it. If the release TBC tons of people that want classic would quit and some will just go back to private servers.
I think it is a rather big change.
In Classic, you didn't get any decent gear by just questing, so you had to enter dungeons in order to get decent rewards from quests or drops themselves.
In TBC, the gear from questing was already decent enough.
I still remember that i practically skipped all low level dungeons past Ramparts / Blood furnace, as i didn't feel it was worth the time, especially as most of the items that i had were "good enough" already.
Due to quests also being designed in a more efficient manner, running dungeons wasn't exactly superior in terms of XP compared to questing, unless you could speedrun them.
I think doing dungeons while leveling was an important aspect, taught people the ropes of the endgame that lied ahead, someone who went from 1-70 without doing any dungeons suddenly had to learn the very basics of 5man party.
Whereas in Classic, you were confronted with this early on, because dungeons were rather important unless you played a class that excelled at solo leveling.
TBC turned the questing experience into a "just get to 58 ASAP" because Outland questing was so much more rewarding and efficient than Vanilla.
The more fitting description would be that Blizzard didn't bother to balance PvP at all.
It's not like Blizzard made changes that made sense for a BG setting but nonsense for Arena, they just didn't do anything on that front.
However, based on the fact that Arena both yielded the best PvP gear (even so far that buying the weapon / shoulders required a rating) and awarded titles & Mount on top of that, showed that Blizzard wanted to push PvP players towards Arena.
Battlegrounds went from the "real deal" to the place where you farmed honor for catchup gear and badges for offset pieces.
Like seriously, Random BG's in TBC were infested with utterly undergeared people that just wanted to jump from greens to gladiator gear and Honorbots.
I disagree.
The overall gameplay and reward structure was still similar, that's what makes a lot of people say that, but it changed a lot of other aspects and set up changes with heavy implications down the line.
Last edited by Kralljin; 2019-09-24 at 03:45 PM.
I think a lot of people would like to re-live the expansion they started in, so while Vanilla is #1, there are plenty of people interested in at least BC and WOTLK, and all three are/were very popular in the not-public-server-world.
If they do BC I'd do something like create new BC servers and have the option whether you want your character to (irreversibly) transfer from Classic to Classic-BC etc. Then people can decide how they want to progress.
But at some point when they're announcing the availability of Classic-BfA servers you would have to consider that things have gone too far
I REALLY don't think you'll see new original development in the Classic world at this point. It's just too much money and Blizzard already thinks they made things better with every release. At best you might see a future Retail expansion swing back in the direction of those aspects of vanilla that everyone now recognizes as having been superior.
I don't disagree necessarily, but I think it would fall somewhere in the middle - character copies with prio for your duped server, for instance - perhaps a stipulation that servers without enough people signed up to transfer get merged. Too much overhead to just automatically copy every character created during classic.
I don't want to be forced to have my classic characters pushed into post vanilla content. If it was opt in to COPY classic characters to a C+/BC realm, I'd consider it.
Bandwagon sports fans can eat a bag of http://www.ddir.com/ .
Ahh, so this time they'll do multiverse correctly. Gotcha. Yeah, I don't have as much faith as you have. Time Travel and Multiverse always screw with lore.
So after we have shown ourselves to be able to defeat the greatest known threat in the world, we then progress to fighting some scrubs...
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We are already split. There's literally no connection between Classic servers. Furthermore, as people stop playing Classic Vanilla, servers will get smaller and eventually consolidated. That will happen without Classic TBC. But when that does happen, they can release Classic TBC and folks will jump back in like they are doing now with Classic Vanilla.
"Take the time to sit down and talk with your adversaries. You will learn something, and they will learn something from you. When two enemies are talking, they are not fighting. It's when the talking ceases that the ground becomes fertile for violence. So keep the conversation going."
~ Daryl Davis
Releasing tBC's content is fine.
Updating the systems and design philosophy to tBC is not.
That means:
Every single thing added except the landmass itself should be kept out - including increased level.
- No arenas
- No new abilities
- No core class changes
- No flying (that's a big one!)
- No heroic dungeons (retune existing dungeons to be harder - they are now extending level 60 content)
- 40-man and 20-man raids instead
The content will have to be retuned for Classic.
Ensure that the old world is still completely relevant and viable, that is do not make Outland give excessive amounts of XP per hour and do not let the gear completely eclipse anything from Azeroth.
Make adjustments to keep the game philosophically in line with Classic:
- Remove the portals from Shattrath and add an Auction House that is separate from the others. (No portals! Important aspect of Classic)
- Make sure it's possible to get to all instances and content without a flying mount. Use gnomish/goblin teleporters
- Remove flying mounts, and Netherwing Ledge, Shagri'la, Elemental Plateau, etc. with it.
- Remove dailies
- Merge dungeon wings together (to the extent it is possible)
- Remove dungeon lockouts
- Karazhan on a 3 day lockout
Etc.
Basically, take all the systems advancements and just drop them. Retune the content to the systems of Classic. Remove content that won't fit.
To me, this makes the most sense. C TBC on it's own. C Vanilla on it's own. Your characters will live on in C Vanilla whenever you want to log in and play them. TBC characters should start from scratch. Everyone has a level playing field, especially considering a lot of folks changed the class they played in BC based on the changes, and you can't transfer Ally Shaman or Horde Paladin.
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Sounds to me like you would prefer to just stay on Classic Vanilla servers, which is fine. Don't try to ruin Classic TBC for those of us who liked it, and I promise not to recommend they ruin Classic Vanilla.
"Take the time to sit down and talk with your adversaries. You will learn something, and they will learn something from you. When two enemies are talking, they are not fighting. It's when the talking ceases that the ground becomes fertile for violence. So keep the conversation going."
~ Daryl Davis