I am lost they are concerned about low pop "classic era" servers. what about TBC?

[Prag]

It’s probably a bad week to test it, but at peak time last night I went on my old Classic server (Mankrik), which was always packed. There were 42 level 60’s online. Pagle is the Alliance equivalent and it was quiet as well. All Classic Era shows “Low” right now.

Again, not a great time to test, but my hunch is that they’ll have to merge Classic to 1 PvP, 1 PvE and 1 RP server for each region.

TBCC will have dead servers, too.

[kranur]

Classic Era is pretty dead atm. Even with the connections there were 40 level 60 on and sub 200 players total. Maybe after a few weeks in TBC some people will return.

[lagiacrux]

You can just look at raid participation in every tier for classic and compare it to raid participaton on retail. Classic raids have about twice as many people playing them as retail does on heroic & mythic combined in EU & NA. 60%, since retail does not have chinese API we can't readily compare them, but classic china has between 2 and 3 times the raiding playerbase as EU and NA does, meaning it's also 2-3 times bigger than the EU &NA retail, mythic scene.

After weighing for cross tier participation on retail, i.e the same players/characters who raid on both normal, heroic, mythic the number of active characters shrink significantly, just under half of those who clear normal also clear heroic, meaning about 1/3 of raiders on retail are doing normal raids per tier.

All this amounts to, even if you did not weigh or took every number at face value, that EU & NA classic has atleast parity with retail raiders in numbers. All these numbers are verifiable through WCL participation data.

and whats your point? you cherry picked raid participation with weird parameters and think you brought up valuable data?
the argument still stands. WE DO NOT HAVE RELIABLE DATA! nothing you brought up here disputes that.

[NineSpine]

1. Ok, let's play that game. I counted EU English TBC realms and SL realms right now (retail from wowprogress, so all connected realms are merged). Right now TBC Classic has 7 full realms, 6 high, 7 medium, 3 low - total 23. Retail has 5 full, 10 high, 6 medium, 15 low, 1 for new players - total 37.

Let's put some simple score to show results better (1 point for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high, 5 for full): Classic would have 70, Retail 82. And we talk about situation literally day after TBC pre-patch and pretty dire content situation in SL (no patch last 6 months). Many usual retail players play Classic right now.

Still think Classic is more popular on regular day? Let's face it, TBC will be more popular between June 1st and ~week before 9.1, but that's it.

2. 'Retail business' was never about 'constant subs'. They were never constant, we always had players coming, players quiting game, players staying for long or some even whole time. But between 2005 and 2010 WoW was still fresh game, amount of people checking out what it is about was higher that number of people quitting during Vanilla/TBC and big enough to even out sub number during Wrath. It's obvious more people comes for patches.

And it work similar in Classic, but with two changes: initial wave was way higher than typical WoW expac, but drop as well, way bigger than usual ~50% on retail. And new content didn't really bring many people, Classic main grips were nostalgia, simple world and simple but meaningful (aka long) leveling.

3. I don't know where you get FFXIV is "consistently growing in players". If you want link some "we reached 5 million accounts!" message or sth like that, please don't.

4. This one I agree, SL is smaller (not "exceptionally smaller", Legion had similar sized continent, MoP/WoD same amount of dungeons on launch) than BfA and Legion, especially BfA that was enormous. But comparing it to TBC is absurd, modern content is more detailed than empty zone with 5 boars and copy paste dungeon environment.

5. On Blizzcon they haven't highlighted either, TBC got reveal and short panel, 9.1 got reveal and short panel. About people, obviously people are more hyped about expac than patch, no matter retail or classic. Did you see ANY Naxx hype when SL launch was coming?

6. Rest of your post is just usual "WoW is dying this time for sure". Maybe in 2013 someone with brain would believe this. But now? After 10 years of stable expac sales that are even growing (to be fair, 3.7M for SL will be hard to beat cause lockdown situation)?

WoW is in mature state, it Blizzard will do similar job with every expac, it could stay like this longer than many expect, obviously with ups and downs. If expac sale (only specific data we have) would be lower and lower every 2 years I would believe WoW is slowly shrinking. But nothing suggest that.

This is a whole lot of nonsense that doesn’t really seem to be responding to anything I actually said. I never said one word about classic era vs tbc popularity. I specifically said wow isn’t doing to die yet you rant and rave about how that’s all I’m saying. I’m not sure why anyone would dedicate so much time to posting paragraph after paragraph attacking a weird straw man. Have a good day.

[Dracullus]

This is a whole lot of nonsense that doesn’t really seem to be responding to anything I actually said. I never said one word about classic era vs tbc popularity. I specifically said wow isn’t doing to die yet you rant and rave about how that’s all I’m saying. I’m not sure why anyone would dedicate so much time to posting paragraph after paragraph attacking a weird straw man. Have a good day.

Lol, way to shit on someones effort. Just call everything nonsense and strawman. I just respond to two things for sake of other people reading it.

First, I compared SL and TBC servers. I repeat once more, I counted SL connected servers as single realms. Who the hell was comparing vanilla and tbc? Looks like you didn't ever read what I wrote.

Second, end of your previous post was clearly 'wow is dying', you just didn't said it will die, just shrink every year while classic will be stable and FF 14 grow for some reason. I responded that nothing suggest WoW playerbase is shrinking after it stabilized after first few expacs and launch sales confirms that.

[Scathan]

Lol, way to shit on someones effort. Just call everything nonsense and strawman. I just respond to two things for sake of other people reading it.

First, I compared SL and TBC servers. I repeat once more, I counted SL connected servers as single realms. Who the hell was comparing vanilla and tbc? Looks like you didn't ever read what I wrote.

Second, end of your previous post was clearly 'wow is dying', you just didn't said it will die, just shrink every year while classic will be stable and FF 14 grow for some reason. I responded that nothing suggest WoW playerbase is shrinking after it stabilized after first few expacs and launch sales confirms that.

Hi, ffxiv player here. For the record ffxiv is growing. Right now typically is a slow time in the cycle for final fantasy. And I can we have a very large number of sprout players I see running around. Most of them dabbling in the game because 9.1 is so far out. Some of them won't return to Wow.

[WaltherLeopold]

and whats your point? you cherry picked raid participation with weird parameters and think you brought up valuable data?
the argument still stands. WE DO NOT HAVE RELIABLE DATA! nothing you brought up here disputes that.

What cherry picking, I listed all available data on raid participation.

I did disclude china from the comparison, as you saw because we do not have a chinese analog due to the API being missing on retail.

It's kinda weird that you're using this argument against me, because using your logic, there is no reliable data saying that classic doesn't somehow dominate WoW subscriptions and it's only your particular bias and slant that makes you deduce that, the lack of ""reliable data"" (whatever that means) is an indication of classic being a niche title. Obviously the data I mentioned doesn't prove anything other than that people play the game, which was the entire point I was making, is that a lot of people play the game.

[NineSpine]

Lol, way to shit on someones effort. Just call everything nonsense and strawman. I just respond to two things for sake of other people reading it.

First, I compared SL and TBC servers. I repeat once more, I counted SL connected servers as single realms. Who the hell was comparing vanilla and tbc? Looks like you didn't ever read what I wrote.

Second, end of your previous post was clearly 'wow is dying', you just didn't said it will die, just shrink every year while classic will be stable and FF 14 grow for some reason. I responded that nothing suggest WoW playerbase is shrinking after it stabilized after first few expacs and launch sales confirms that.

I’m not interested in weird crap like applying arbitrary ratings to server populations so that we can compare apples to oranges in self serving ways. It’s silly. We don’t know how server population designations are graded for connected realms. We can’t do anything with that data. We only know how it works for unconnected realms.

Launch sales don’t mean anything. That’s worthless data.

FF14 reports subscriber increases or declines in their shareholder calls, unlike wow. Since they do that, we know they consistently report sub growth, even mid expansion. They reported sub growth from the launch of shadowbringers to mid expansion one year later.

I’m also not interested in silly shit like “sure we had way more dungeons and raids and zones but the new ones have so much more detail!” They don’t. The art assets are higher quality, like every other game on the market. That’s it. There’s no more going on in Maldraxxus than there was in Netherstorm. Get real.

[deenman]

it'll balance itself out. people are just checking out TBC, some will return when TBC has some downtime, the community will grow for vanilla-classic. That said, I think seasonal 'fresh-progression' servers could be nice.

oh yeah,they would be crazy not to do fresh servers,i mean look at diablo 3,that game would LITERALY be dead if the season system didnt exist,there is literaly nothing to do in that game unless you play seasons,and it brings in tens of thausands of players back everytime lol,its kinda sad actualy how much better games like grim dawn dont get that attention

[NineSpine]

oh yeah,they would be crazy not to do fresh servers,i mean look at diablo 3,that game would LITERALY be dead if the season system didnt exist,there is literaly nothing to do in that game unless you play seasons,and it brings in tens of thausands of players back everytime lol,its kinda sad actualy how much better games like grim dawn dont get that attention

Wow will eventually have rolling progression servers. I only hope that next time they launch new classic era ones they don’t have fucking world buffs.

[Deferionus]

And you have any data to back it up? Just simple comparison of amount of servers and their population tells complete different story.

On my classic server, which is listed as medium pop, I could go to Org at any time and find 100+ people. This is before prepatch, on 1.13 which had been out and cleared for months, at 3 am in the morning. The classic world in my experience seems to be more populated than retail. I am not saying classic is more popular than retail, because with laying and instances used on the modern game its impossible to compare, but classic most certainly was not dead or hurting.

[NineSpine]

On my classic server, which is listed as medium pop, I could go to Org at any time and find 100+ people. This is before prepatch, on 1.13 which had been out and cleared for months, at 3 am in the morning. The classic world in my experience seems to be more populated than retail. I am not saying classic is more popular than retail, because with laying and instances used on the modern game its impossible to compare, but classic most certainly was not dead or hurting.

You’re talking to a guy who thinks his personal intuition should be the default (it FEELS to him like classic is niche and unpopular therefore we must prove that wrong and he doesn’t have to prove that right).

[WaltherLeopold]

And you have any data to back it up? Just simple comparison of amount of servers and their population tells complete different story.

WoW Classic and WoW retail does not use the same metric for realm sizes. Retail uses a relative system which compares every server to the highest population realm, while classic uses an absolutist system which measures the realms absolute capacity. This is why you do not have queues on retail, but you do on classic because queues indicate that the server is quite literally full or player activity needs to be throttled.

https://www.bluetracker.gg/wow/topic...-label-system/

Edit: it's worth noting that, a medium pop realm on classic has been stated to be larger than an old full realm, which we have verified was in the thousands of players. There's no wonder then that WoW classic is and continues to be a massive success for Blizzard.

[Deferionus]

Wow will eventually have rolling progression servers. I only hope that next time they launch new classic era ones they don’t have fucking world buffs.

Agreed. World buffs is a large part of why I did not play. I know there's a large #nochanges movement, but I would like a modern game with classic design philosophies. This sounds like a lol wut?' statement but what I mean is:

Classic was designed for people with shitty PCs and dial up connections. Modern gaming PCs and internet service trivializes the game in many regards. There is a real case to be made for a retuning of the raids to account for this. By increasing the challenge, you in reality make the game more like a real classic experience because raids are not loot piñatas and having the gear is more of an accomplishment.

I also believe they should have got rid of the debuff limit and did some balancing to make it to where prot paladins and ferals are valid tanks and make druids and shamans more in line with priest healing. This would improve the game by making it easier to do 5 man content in the abstance of group finder - which they absolutely should not add.

[NineSpine]

Agreed. World buffs is a large part of why I did not play. I know there's a large #nochanges movement, but I would like a modern game with classic design philosophies. This sounds like a lol wut?' statement but what I mean is:

Classic was designed for people with shitty PCs and dial up connections. Modern gaming PCs and internet service trivializes the game in many regards. There is a real case to be made for a retuning of the raids to account for this. By increasing the challenge, you in reality make the game more like a real classic experience because raids are not loot piñatas and having the gear is more of an accomplishment.

I also believe they should have got rid of the debuff limit and did some balancing to make it to where prot paladins and ferals are valid tanks and make druids and shamans more in line with priest healing. This would improve the game by making it easier to do 5 man content in the abstance of group finder - which they absolutely should not add.

I agree broadly, but there are issues that can’t be addressed with simple buffs. The big problem with scaling for a lot of specs at endgame is itemization. There aren’t good items for a lot of the specs and so they fall behind. Fixing that itemization would require pretty heavy handed overhauls of the endgame loot tables and that could be a bit much. It’s a really tough problem to solve.

World buffs are just clearly, obviously cancerous to the game and it’s insane to not fix them.

[Deferionus]

You’re talking to a guy who thinks his personal intuition should be the default (it FEELS to him like classic is niche and unpopular therefore we must prove that wrong and he doesn’t have to prove that right).

There is real appeal to a older game design for some players. While I miss some things about retail that I think were overall good additions (pet battles, transmog), for each of those systems there was 3 bad ones added. And on transmog, I would limit it a bit by making it so you can only have it apply in rest areas, but going thats going into a systems discussion.

- - - Updated - - -

I agree broadly, but there are issues that can’t be addressed with simple buffs. The big problem with scaling for a lot of specs at endgame is itemization. There aren’t good items for a lot of the specs and so they fall behind. Fixing that itemization would require pretty heavy handed overhauls of the endgame loot tables and that could be a bit much. It’s a really tough problem to solve.

World buffs are just clearly, obviously cancerous to the game and it’s insane to not fix them.

Honestly fixing the itemization would be good too. Far as it being heavy handed, a lot of the work was already done in BC.

[NineSpine]

There is real appeal to a older game design for some players. While I miss some things about retail that I think were overall good additions (pet battles, transmog), for each of those systems there was 3 bad ones added. And on transmog, I would limit it a bit by making it so you can only have it apply in rest areas, but going thats going into a systems discussion.

- - - Updated - - -



Honestly fixing the itemization would be good too. Far as it being heavy handed, a lot of the work was already done in BC.

I agree broadly once again. I don’t like transmog for a variety of reasons.

Fixing the itemization is problematic and heavy handed because the loot tables are already full, so you’d have to solve it by creating token systems, or changing how drops work entirely so you can target things. It gets weird and starts to drift away from the design paradigm of classic era.

It’s a tough needle to thread and I don’t really trust the people behind the chrono world buffs nonsense to fix it lol

[erifwodahs]

Classic is incredibly popular, on par if not more popular than retail.

Oh, that's why "medium" listed realm had 3 people leveling in crossroads? I still have not done a single dungeon run because it took us over 3 hours to find 4 people and 5th one never shoved up. Any other attempts were just a waste of time. You have same 10 people in realm discord which has over 3k members and LFG channels get 2 messages a week. Truly great.

[Ehrenpanzer]

You can just look at raid participation in every tier for classic and compare it to raid participaton on retail. Classic raids have about twice as many people playing them as retail does on heroic & mythic combined in EU & NA. 60%, since retail does not have chinese API we can't readily compare them, but classic china has between 2 and 3 times the raiding playerbase as EU and NA does, meaning it's also 2-3 times bigger than the EU &NA retail, mythic scene.

After weighing for cross tier participation on retail, i.e the same players/characters who raid on both normal, heroic, mythic the number of active characters shrink significantly, just under half of those who clear normal also clear heroic, meaning about 1/3 of raiders on retail are doing normal raids per tier.

All this amounts to, even if you did not weigh or took every number at face value, that EU & NA classic has atleast parity with retail raiders in numbers. All these numbers are verifiable through WCL participation data.

Thats just silly. Thats like saying Retail has twice as many people playing because there are twice as many people in WSG on retail. You can cherry pick statistics all you like, but unless you actually WORK for Blizzard and have ACTUAL participation metrics, its all just speculation.

[Queen of Hamsters]

Ya'll simply never tire, do you?

- I like Classic more, therefore it has FAR MORE players than the version I DON'T like!!
- Oh yeah?? Well I like Retail more, therefore it has FAR MORE players than the version I don't like!!!

Cue the asspulls and entirely subjective "facts".

Follow the Quarterly reports, people. Classic is bigger than Retail in China. Retail is bigger than Classic in the West. Classic is driving good profits, so is Retail. This is not a zero-sum game where 1 version needs to be dying in order for the other to thrive. They literally use the same sub. This constant circling of the same alternative facts to support the poster's feelings, is just being pathetic.