What is the long term plan, if any?

[Toxuvox]

The answer to this question can be found by looking at what folks were doing on the classic private servers once they'd cleared all available content. They either level a new toon, strut around faction capitals in "Look at muh gear" mode, or quit playing having gotten exactly what they came for. I mean, what was the original motivation behind the clamouring for officially supported pristine vanilla servers? Surely it wasn't backed by a fervent hope of something more that what vanilla actually was, was it?

[tikcol]

Resetting characters would obviously be silly, but a new set of fresh realms is exactly what P Servers found success with. Lots of people like that system and played in it for years. There was always carryover of players between resets and each reset also drew fresh blood. There's even people who love to play Classic but only on fresh servers because of the leveling experience.

It would require minimal maintenance and be enough to support what the Classic community already has experience with and has proven successful in the past.

Next fresh pls

[Nak88]

TBC and WotLK, everyone knows it. They will also keep some perennial Vanilla servers for the #nochanges divas but that's it.

[Vorkreist]

Remember what Blizzard said when they announced Classic? It mostly serves the purpose of a museum not something that has to grow and mandatory to provide new content and new gimmicks to keep some players engaged.
Hard to swallow pill for the classic + classic minus crowd but thats the reality.

[Big Thanks]

ZG fist weapons
some epics

lastly...try to create a 25% hit rating rogue...a rogue who never misses

Spam Battlegrouns with said gear

I need nothing else from classic wow...i dont want BC servers...if anything i want wrath or classic+

[MrLachyG]

As much as I prefer Classic over Live/Retail for the MMORPG aspect, it's always been obvious that Classic lives upon burrowed time. Content that used to keep people surprised, confused and lost nowadays has a thousand and one guides exactly how to progress.
WoW classic raid content is being cleared near-ridiculously quickly, and people in Orgrimmar look like they've all been in Nihilum for half a year, gathering gear.

So what do you think Blizzards wants to do with Classic once Naxxramas is cleared? Will they keep players running naxx until people are decked in t3, or will they prefer resets?
I have to be honest, I'd prefer Blizzard doing server resets rather than people getting absolutely decked in T3.
WoW Classic will either need "resets" or Blizzard making BC/LK releases for Classic going forward.

Unless they're doing BC servers, I'd rather see them resetting everything 1-3 months after Kel'Thuzad is down, instead of watching everyone getting completely BiSed for all eternity :-P

the problem with releasing BC content, then Wrath is where do they stop? Classic has a finite amount of content. everyone knew that from the start and changing anything would simply result in something that isn't Classic any more

[Heathy]

it seems like either its just going to be classic or they have the option to move onto a tbc server, I just can't see them making content for classic, most of the original rumours have been covered since those days, karazhan was rumoured to be more 60 content but must have been pushed at some stage to tbc, the emerald dream was a rumour for a while and we eventually got a taste of that in legion, that idea floated around for a while that we would get an expansion set in the emerald dream but the idea of that version of azeroth is one that is totally untouched by mortals so there would be no cities etc just an untouched version of azeroth. might be difficult to design that.

i can't see them doing a 20 or 40 man level 60 version of karazhan because its just too cramped the whole thing would need a redesign. the fact that Atiesh portals you to karazhan it did seem like the place could have at one point, been slated to be a 60 instance but I think blizzard realised that they needed to go bigger than just adding single raids and had to do a whole expansion.

[Speedlance]

TBC is the next and wrath after that. Very easy. Classic has below 100000 players atm. Its a niche that blizzard want to maintain and not improve beyond that. Its basically free money for them as is.

[MiiiMiii]

They don't dare to do anything to Classic WoW. They don't want a single person to go say "this is not the classic experience" and play on a private server instead.

If they got it their way, the Token would probably make it to Western regions too. They STILL think the Token is a good thing for an economy based MMORPG. The Chinese players had this atrocity forced down their throat. "They want it". Ok? Do they want all the other "improvements" Blizzard has made like 4 raid difficulties, level boosts, M+, heirlooms, scaling mobs and Artifact Power? No. They want Classic WoW.

The only thing they can do is make TBC. Any creative thinking involved from current developers cannot, and should not, be trusted.

[Devilyaki]

Nothing. Keep it up as classic then just let it sit. Apparently it’s the best thing ever so why change or add to it right?

[Mosotti]

A new entry will appear in the Blizzard launcher called WoW TBC. You will have the option to level or copy character from classic. At least 1 million people will subscribe making it seem like the retail version is successful. I know much more people who prefer TBC over vanilla, me included, I think they will make a good profit, especially since they've said that TBC will likely be easier to implement. Of course there's only one starting zone in TBC so they should need again to do the layer thingy, but hopefully with moar servers.

[Nak88]

Classic has below 100000 players atm.

Can you provide any quotations or sources for such a false statement?

[Mayia]

As much as I prefer Classic over Live/Retail for the MMORPG aspect, it's always been obvious that Classic lives upon burrowed time. Content that used to keep people surprised, confused and lost nowadays has a thousand and one guides exactly how to progress.
WoW classic raid content is being cleared near-ridiculously quickly, and people in Orgrimmar look like they've all been in Nihilum for half a year, gathering gear.

So what do you think Blizzards wants to do with Classic once Naxxramas is cleared? Will they keep players running naxx until people are decked in t3, or will they prefer resets?
I have to be honest, I'd prefer Blizzard doing server resets rather than people getting absolutely decked in T3.
WoW Classic will either need "resets" or Blizzard making BC/LK releases for Classic going forward.

Unless they're doing BC servers, I'd rather see them resetting everything 1-3 months after Kel'Thuzad is down, instead of watching everyone getting completely BiSed for all eternity :-P

These are my fears.
Blizzard will keep releasing content faster than required because a couple of idiots rush everything (yes i'm clearing the raids easily but i can chill) and they'll rush into TBC without even thinking or planning for Classic + then wrath will swing by after and by time they consider doing something for classic + it'll be 2-3 years of dev time AFTER everything has been re-released giving us a massive wait time before anything good again.

What i would like.. is a plan now to consider fixing Karazhan for level 60 get working on it and have a plan to open more servers to be TBC servers you copy your characters to then in some downtime during the TBC they release Karazhan for classic, with gear abit less good than Naxx and abit of a challenge for a smaller raid and see how that goes over see how easy it is to adapt how it feels fitting into old content etc

This way at least they are in the process of doing classic plus seeing how people feel about it BEFORE all the interest is gone and everyone has moved on, i also feel like re-doing wrath is a great time to re-visit removed content of the underground world.. they mapped out a lot of it but never finished it.

how fantastic would it be to play through wrath but instead of trial of the filler raid we went somewhere awesome.

[Monster Hunter]

Nothing for a long time is my prediction.

TBC servers might come out sometime near the end of Shadowlands life cycle.

But I'd bet if tbc ever happens they will be fresh servers and nothing from classic will cross over to the new tbc servers.

Classic is what blizz said they wanted it to be, a museum nothing more.

[Ickz]

They'll progress servers into TBC, then WoTLK. This is the method with the least amount of work on Blizz's end and they have a lot to gain. I predict the overall classic playerbase will go up with each xpac just like it did back in the day - I imagine there's tons of players out there that skipped current classic, but are waiting for "their" xpac to come up. The question is are they going to give players options to keep playing in the xpac of their choice? I've seen a lot of people say they want the option to stay on a permanent vanilla version of their current classic server instead of moving on to TBC. Not my thing, personally, but hey. Not sure how Blizz would go about with that - maybe open a small pool of new perma-60 servers that you can xfer your characters to at the same time consolidating the current classic servers to help with dead realms for future content (although, this really needs to happen well before TBC... honestly, even AQ/Naxx).

I also see them occasionally opening completely fresh progression servers that start back in vanilla. I believe EQ has had success with that over the years.

[Shammyrock]

probably just release TBC when classic content releases are done

[facefist]

Tbc or fresh servers. I think tbc makes more sense from business point of view, unless its super hard to implement (Which I don't believe it is)

[slime]

The answer to this question can be found by looking at what folks were doing on the classic private servers once they'd cleared all available content. They either level a new toon, strut around faction capitals in "Look at muh gear" mode, or quit playing having gotten exactly what they came for. I mean, what was the original motivation behind the clamouring for officially supported pristine vanilla servers? Surely it wasn't backed by a fervent hope of something more that what vanilla actually was, was it?

Agreed. If the do a BC launch - I would think it would have nothing to do with Classic and would be all new servers.

[cuafpr]

at most some sort of "Season" where you can start a new toon that is restricted from trading with non-seasonal characters a'la diablo ...but more likely it sits.

[Razorice]

The day they release Wotlk servers (If ever) is the day I quit Retail.