[WoW] Reach 60 in Classic, and receive BfA and 110 boost for free!!

It might. They are basically trying to pull all those old vanilla players back to retail as well as looking at the data for the Classic participation to rule on future retail design.

If Classic is more popular then Retail will be forced back into a Classic design principle. No doubt about it. That is where the beef of their development dollars go and they want the largest audience they can get. It makes perfect financial sense.

I'm one of those people who think the store mounts, transmog, new models, etc was never the problem. It was a purely design issue with the game becoming more and more instanced within each development cycle. More self serving, more solo, less community focused.

The increase hassle on our side to multibox was just a side effect of this disastrous design choice. These things are systemic. As I talk on the gen forum all the time instanced content breeds exclusivity in participation. It forces the developers to make increasingly more difficult content to challenge an exceedingly smaller number of players. Everyone else just gets left out. The game becomes narrower and narrower in dynamics stripping peer 2 peer and pvp out of the equation, forcing you to play with people you need versus you want and making the entire experience more of a boring chore. Raid burnout happens, casuals dip into LFR instead of trying to fit in and eventually everyone is alone doing World Quests. A total yawnfest.

If I weren't 5 boxing this game I would have been gone a long time ago. I'm not playing Classic but I'm hoping to hell that the development crew is watching it like hawks to learn how to pull retail back from the brink.