Forgive me; Long time lurker, very few posts...
At the risk of putting my tinfoil hat on, has anyone besides me given thought to some of the new underlying tech that has been implemented into WoW Classic? With the dynamic instantiations of whole worlds (layering) and the improved data structure, I geek out pretty hard when I hear their engineers talk about it.
One thing I have not heard (no idea if they mentioned this) is that they have several data collection systems in place for WoW Classic. I will go out on a limb to say that this classic "experiment" is going to be a gold mine of data for them to determine how to make the next expansion of WoW or possibly give them justification to finally do WoW 2.0.
Although I would imagine most of the next expansion is already set in stone, the lessons they will learn from Classic could be Blizzard's way of having actionable data to bring forth WoW 2.0 to investors. Data that shows that there exists a large number of people willing to go back to square one and start over because of the inherent gameplay and systems of vanilla. The big data point for them would be how many current active players left retail and went to Classic. If that number proves to be significant, it will calm the fears of WoW taking a huge loss on their subscribers because people did not want to lose their "progress" if ever a WoW 2.0 was released.
At that point, current "retail" wow would be packaged into the subscription as they are doing now with Classic and everyone would still have the option of the old WoW and then the new WoW 2.0. Just a thought... Sorry if this was posted else where - if so, I can remove the post. Thank you all!