Blizzard responds to Nostalrius discussion

[MiRai]

I would most certainly love to multibox the rougher, more tedious content (e.g. 5/10-man dungeons), but it'd also be very easy for a multiboxer to actually raid with 30-35 other people (and include other multiboxers!) if we could go back to those days.

Arguably, you can still do this in LFR, but... eh...

However, I have no desire for a "pristine" realm.

I read the wiki on it and says they have between 8000 and 15000 online. Is that alot? For Blizzard to do something like that it seems like it will cost millions and millions just to earn them thousands and thousands.

But at least they're discussing it.

24/7 or just peak prime-time?

A few months ago, after its 1-year anniversary and prior to any C&D letters, Nostalrius released an infographic showing their numbers - http://i.imgur.com/jxtOQlu.jpg

Whether the information in that graphic is true or not is not something anyone outside of their team could possibly know, but if you've watched any of the "good-bye" videos over the past few weeks I would say that it's probably accurate. At the time of shutdown the numbers were apparently 800,000+ registered accounts and 150,000+ active—at least according to the Change.org petition that is currently running.

However, what I've read over the past few weeks (since I've been trying to keep up with it all as best as I could), retail servers back in vanilla had about a 2500 player cap according to Mark Kern—who is the ex-lead WoW developer for vanilla/classic—but I've also heard other people post this information randomly on the internet throughout the years before I had ever heard it from Mark Kern. So, 8,000-15,000 players on a single realm would be incredibly overpopulated, and this was what Ironforge looked like during its final minutes on the PvE realm, which was an additional realm opened after the original PvP realm to help offload those only looking for PvE.

Others have also pointed out that Nostalrius's numbers only account for a 10-day window, whereas any company reporting a subscriber base does it over a 30-day window, so it's likely a lot higher than that infographic shows (again, assuming it's true).

As for 150k active, my understanding is that was measured over a 10 day window. The industry standard for measuring active is 30 days. I bet the 30 day number is higher, but even at 150k, during vanilla WoW we only expected around 450k active subscribers, and it would have been a huge success.

Source

Did anyone here box during Vanilla? I two boxed until Wrath.. but I did it old school way until I discovered this forum during BC and the joy of 5 boxing! I would definitely make a group for that! What sucks though.. You wouldn't be able to make a paly+shaman team if it were a true vanilla realm. Were Bears tanks good in vanilla?

I didn't start multiboxing until TBC, and it was me just running two accounts and moving between them so that I could power level a second Warrior to avoid having to constantly respec my main Warrior.

I don't think any tanks were viable for any serious progression beside Warriors, but I remember playing with a Ret Paladin back in the early days and he tanked all of the instances. So... /shrug