This is from a colleague of mine who works in lives in a particular city in a particular island nation for a particular company. He knows I play WoW and forwarded this to me:
- Blizzard is disappointed that WoW Classic is such a joke and everyone is laughing at them in industry and looking at WoW Classic as an example of how NOT to relaunch things - think Anthem and Breakpoint teams.
- Everything is way too easy and everything gets exploited and abused as soon as it is released, because the playerbase is no longer as naive as they were back in the day.
- So they are massively buffing BWL. They internal tests and calculations show that it will be full cleared in under an hour after release. That's content that's meant to last players a few months.
- They are buffing everything in the raid. Most likely through resistances and mob damage. They can't really add any mechanics.
- All current gear is going to be useless for BWL and players will have to get pure resist gear, just to survive in there. This means that some bosses will be mathematically unkillable for a while, until the players figure it out and Blizzard "fixes" it.
- Depending on the success of this, same thing will happen with AQ and Naxx further down the track.
- Although initially things looked positive, the decline overall in subs has been disastrous.
- The costs to develop and launch Classic are much, much greater than many seem to realise, and the initial budget was blown out by over 45%.
- During launch month, multiple teams were reassigned to help deal with the workload, and are no longer required. Expect an announcement regarding layoffs soon.
- All future development has been put on hold, including the 2022 launch of BC realms. This may be revisited at a later date, but seems unlikely at this time.