What If... They SKIP BC?

[Rotted]

A side story

[lummiuster]

That's not how it works. Let me use a really really dumbed down example to explain it to you.

Say there's a town where a car dealerships sets up shop, and sells cars to people in the town. Lets say the only model they offer is a sports car.
Lets say only 20% of the town's population have interest in sports cars.

Initially the car isn't well known so it doesn't sell well.

As it becomes better known and word of mouth gets around, reviews get out and people start to test drive / recommend the car, the people looking for a sports car start to buy it. The snowball effect starts once sports car fans start raving about how good it is. Some folks at this stage WANT to buy it, but they need to get some money or get rid of their existing car first. Regardless, numbers are still growing at this stage.

Eventually the majority of the market in this town for sports cars has been tapped. Sales numbers start to stagnate. Let us also say that this coincidentally happens around the same time the sports car maker releases a new SUV model.

A stupid person would go "Oh, sales figures for this car have stagnated, it must be the fault of them becoming more focused on SUVs!"

A smart person would look at the market, and say "no, its because the sports car market saturation in this town is as its highest. Most of the people who love sports cars already own one now, and they're happily driving them around, so the number of new buyers is quite low. Most of the other people in the town don't care about sports cars."

Obviously this is really simplistic and an economist would laugh at what I just typed, but I'm trying to keep it as basic as possible for you to understand. The fact subscriber numbers stopped growing as much in wrath as they did in BC does not magically mean Wrath flopped in comparison. It could, just could, in this case mean that the majority of folk who WoW caters and appealed to were now aware of the game and playing it, and therefore the number of people the game would appeal to who aren't yet aware of it is much MUCH less than it was during the TBC growth period. AKA, the market was far more tapped by WotLK.

Rival companies were also stepping up their game and releasing titles that were genuine competitors, and in general the MMO market was losing popularity to FPS and Moba type games. Again, this doesn't objectively mean WotLK failed, it just meant the market and times were changing. There's literally so many different potential factors at play, this is why market analysts study hard to become good at what they do. Yet "armchair experts" like yourself just sit down and draw simplistic parallels and proclaim you have it all figured out. It's really not that simple.

Again. Why the hell did you decide we were even close to reach the market cap?
If you think a bit it was exactly the opposite. In 2005, every year the number of internet user would grow. Not just in the US but in the whole damn world the number of internet users were sky rocketing by millions per year. One huge difference between Classic wow and Vanilla wow is that we see much more latinos speaking spanish meaning that more people from foreign countries have access to internet and have enough money to pay a subscription. Btw even my cousin in Nigeria is now playing wow lol, that was unthinkable in 2004 where we had to stop by a cyber-coffee to have internet and play warcraft3.

Your example should have been: "we are in a city that grows by millions per year in population but the sales of a product stopped".

[Rigald]

Because instead of making PvP something where you fight against the other faction in the skirmishes...It was turned into a minigame where the gear you worked SO hard to obtain is utterly useless and you need to work for new gear.

As faulty as vanilla PvP was, the amazing moment when someone wearing a legendary came on the field and could overwhelm the enemy and save you was awe inspiring. Like when Uther came and saved Arthas at Hearthglen, I had amazing moments like that, especially in AV.

While with Resilience, if you don't have resilience you die extremely quickly to massive crits.
They should have either put resillience only on pvp trinkets or stuck to the vanilla model.

You got it but twisted... So let's not reward the people who worked so hard to get that PvP stuff and just let them lose to any guys who just did a lot of PvE?

[Gurluas]

You got it but twisted... So let's not reward the people who worked so hard to get that PvP stuff and just let them lose to any guys who just did a lot of PvE?

That's a horrible equivalent, both types of gear should be good and useful to both types of activities.
Those who PVP earn the good gear by PVPing, those who PVE earn the good gear by PVEing.

There should indeed also be Legendaries you can only get through PvPing.

[kyo wolfsfang]

Fair enough, but at this point pretty much everything beyond Classic has been called to have been the end of "RPG" then. Just trying to understand here, but ...hell...does micro management also mean "managing your bags manually" as in you will skip a lot of addons? And doesn't the risk vs reward thing go out of the window with addons that tell you of danger like DBM (Big Wigs however existed even in Classic)

Where does flying fit into this? I can see how you might prefer finding friends in your questing to then do dungeons and raids with beats LFG immersionwise - but to me there is quite a scope where you can draw the line of what is RPG and what not.

Since you mentioned Skyrim and Morrowind - well...I come from a time of C 64 and Amiga games. Definitely some hardcore (or should we say less QoL) stuff back then. To the point where beating / solving a game that you paid a lot of money for was not guaranteed. On the other hand, even back then we had games with several difficulties, so at least in some of them even weaker players had a chance - but several difficulties are still sth that people attack about WoW....

BC and Wrath still had the RPG elements, Cata is where it was pretty much all removed. Flying i think for BC only is fine as an expansion feature, Not only was it a reward for playing endgame BC, but getting it also opened up even more content. normal flying gave you the ogrila and shatari while epic flying gave you netherwing. Wrath flying wasnt really needed except to access parts of the last 2 zones. which blizz couldve easily gotten around that with simple clickable items. Like the rocket packs on the barrens road where the divide is. or legion grapple hook.

[MasterMirror]

Please don't. WotLK has the worst villain - a pathetic kid, a mere pawn of something bigger - and introduced all the things that "ruined" WoW (as nostalgifags keep screaming), like crap and easy raids, LFG and epic items on vendors.
Let's get to TBC and stop right there, that's Classic WoW (for those who like it, of course).

[Will]

This hits me so much, I played and loved TBC, but still felt it was a wasted expansion for me since I barely saw any raid.
How did you feel about Wotlk? I just couldn't really like that expansion as much, my personal experience went downhill with it, and I even raided. Hopefully this time around I will like it, cause I can't really pinpoint why I disliked it compared to vanilla/tbc.

I did the opposite on wrath, I mostly raided and it was fantastic, I especially loved up to ulduar where they gave us multiple levels of difficulty which we should pick and customise through interacting with our environment, a feature I'd love to see more of.

The dungeons were far too easy though.

The pvp was great in wrath too, but blood dks can choke on one!

But yeah I know what you mean. It was patches 3.2 and 3.3 that introduced heirlooms and the dungeon finder and these were the first truly 'eh?' moments for a lot of players.

- - - Updated - - -

Please don't. WotLK has the worst villain - a pathetic kid, a mere pawn of something bigger - and introduced all the things that "ruined" WoW (as nostalgifags keep screaming), like crap and easy raids, LFG and epic items on vendors.
Let's get to TBC and stop right there, that's Classic WoW (for those who like it, of course).

Lest you forget, tbc is where we first saw vendor epics aka badges of justice.

I agree that lfd was a bad idea.

I think wrath had great raids, sure 10n was too easy but heroic was great, we also had two of the best raids in wows history with ulduar and ICC. I was disappointed how easy the first 4 bosses in ICC were. I don't agree with this principle of loot pinata bosses before you get to the real ones.

[enigma77]

If Vanilla continues to remain popular, I'd say the most likely thing to do for them would be trying to entice these people to play Retail, but offer perhaps a new type of server where the rules are closer to what they are in Vanilla.

I'd prefer Classic + to keep my character and to continue the story in a new way, but I'm not sure they're willing to develop all new content for 2 versions of the game.

Personally I'm not interested in playing TBC or Wrath whatsoever, so if they go down that route, keep it.

[iosdeveloper]

BC was the best expansion, are you on drugs bro?

[enigma77]

BC was the best expansion, are you on drugs bro?

Burning Crusade was the beginning of the end.

Welfare epics, arenas, heroic (hallway) dungeons, flying, Blood Elves on the Horde, Spacegoats on the Alliance.

[klaps_05]

Cata had most subs, so we should skip Wotlk too, tnx. Welcome back your Spellcleave overlords.

[Relapses]

Again. Why the hell did you decide we were even close to reach the market cap?
If you think a bit it was exactly the opposite. In 2005, every year the number of internet user would grow. Not just in the US but in the whole damn world the number of internet users were sky rocketing by millions per year. One huge difference between Classic wow and Vanilla wow is that we see much more latinos speaking spanish meaning that more people from foreign countries have access to internet and have enough money to pay a subscription. Btw even my cousin in Nigeria is now playing wow lol, that was unthinkable in 2004 where we had to stop by a cyber-coffee to have internet and play warcraft3.

Your example should have been: "we are in a city that grows by millions per year in population but the sales of a product stopped".

What a completely pointless anecdotal argument. Your cousin in Nigeria? Lol, why on EARTH would you think that had anything to do with this discussion? You keep framing this like growth only ever occurred because WoW did nothing but add new players and that once it stopped gaining subs, nobody new ever started to play. It's incredibly intellectually dishonest.

[Monster Hunter]

Cancel classic, cancel retail.

Make a starcraft mmo,

I like having opinions

[lummiuster]

What a completely pointless anecdotal argument. Your cousin in Nigeria? Lol, why on EARTH would you think that had anything to do with this discussion? You keep framing this like growth only ever occurred because WoW did nothing but add new players and that once it stopped gaining subs, nobody new ever started to play. It's incredibly intellectually dishonest.

... it was to tell tell you that more people in the world have access to internet and have enough money to afford playing wow. Meaning that the market rose rather than being limited like your thoughts. You are ridiculous. There should not even be a debate about it. It is so obvious. Man your teachers if you even went to school were dumb as fuck. Stop responding you re wasting my time.

[Relapses]

... it was to tell tell you that more people in the world have access to internet and have enough money to afford playing wow. Meaning that the market rose rather than being limited like your thoughts. You are ridiculous. There should not even be a debate about it. It is so obvious. Man your teachers if you even went to school were dumb as fuck. Stop responding you re wasting my time.

So you won't even bother addressing what I said and only want to insult me because I disagree with your absolutely insane argument that because more people have access to the internet in 2019 that WoW should be more popular? (And not just any WoW, only Classic WoW because reasons.) Ok. Cool.