World of Warcraft Classic Discussion Megathread

[Ughmahedhurtz]

WoW Classsic will fail. Too many different groups of people will be expecting different things. People remember the nice nostalgia parts of Vanilla, because that was all they had at the time and were busy playing through it. People do not remember the QoL changes that have been made over the years, and lack of what we consider normal QoL, today, will be one of the sources of people complaining. Some people will be clamoring for changes, others will be complaining about anything that changes.

It is possible that Activision will knuckle-under to the whiners without any coherent strategy for the growth of the product. It is also possible that Blizzard, what there is left of it, will do a better job of keeping Activision at bay than you/we/them think.

That said, here is why I think you're strategically wrong: the untold number of "WoW is DEAD" posts. WoW has died so many times it's crazy, from The Next WoW-Killer-of-the-Week, to terrible changes, to terrible lack of responsiveness to change requests, to Major Game-breaking Bugs, to Raid-Or-Die focus that excluded normies, to You Nerfed All the Things That Made WoW Exciting By Catering To The Normies, to how expensive it is to play, to how cheap it is for hackers/botters to keep playing, to always releasing expansions/raids with too little content to last until the next expansion/raid, and on and on and on....

It has always been thus, and so it shall ever be. Nobody is ever happy. With the general exception here, game forums are almost universally virulent hives of scum and villainy, populated by the personally aggrieved, liked/upvoted by the perpetually outraged, and ignored by the other 90% of players actually playing the game.

So, I also predict WoW will die -- again -- for some, and life for the rest of us in the MMO space will go on as it has for at least the last 15 years.

[Apatheist]

It is not what you think it is..

For the last decade and more there have been multiple vanilla and TBC private servers in existence with tens of thousands of active players who prefer a version of the game before it was ruined by "QoL" changes. Even with all of the bugs and flaws associated with emulated servers.

I'm confident that an officially developed and supported classic server will be a success from that community alone even if not a single current subscriber logs in.

I'm still on the fence hype-wise about it, personally. I just can't see Blizzard reversing their policies against boxing PvP but I hope I'm wrong.

[Kruschpakx4]

given how things are working out for them in bfa there will probably be more players on classic servers atleast until a new expansion releases

[pinarofl]

given how things are working out for them in bfa there will probably be more players on classic servers atleast until a new expansion releases

What it will be for most is, do raids or whatever to keep your main up to content then either start an alt or play classic,

I think classic will have a fair bit of numbers and ALOT of the qq will come from people who are playing classic as a ALT rather then as their main,

Its creating a whole different atmosphere for retail, meaning that there is a high chance that many players will not RAIDLOG/FARMLOG(AKA logging out straight after completing a task) but more so CLASSICLOG(log out and log into classic straight after a task)

this could work for blizzard favour since content droughts wont exists, since playing classic wow part time will take you years to gear up to end game (might be shorter if you play more then a standard raidloger does (which i dont know and I have made an assumption here)

but yeah lets see what happens, i dont think we will see Classic this year to be honest.... unless there are posts stating otherwise.

[sethlan]

given how things are working out for them in bfa there will probably be more players on classic servers atleast until a new expansion releases

wave of people, at any expansion, or even new MMO's, always at high peak, and it dies out slowly, people who never played Classic will hate it (most of them) its not as easy to level as in retail, we can see drop after few months...

[pinarofl]

wave of people, at any expansion, or even new MMO's, always at high peak, and it dies out slowly, people who never played Classic will hate it (most of them) its not as easy to level as in retail, we can see drop after few months...

I think we will see a fast drop after a month not even a few then it will be a gradual decline when people realise that keeping a toon up to scratch in Classic isnt as easy as retail with the whole LFR and this and that.

[JohnGabriel]

Lets say on release Classic has the lowest participation ever of WoW in its history.

Ion announces an achievement for reaching 60 that earns you a full titanforged mythic raid gear reward in retail.

Classic has the highest participation ever and several minute queues to log in.

[pinarofl]

That would be crazy hahahahaa

There would be so much ganking and corps farming to stop people from getting to 60

On a side note oceanic Classic will be so bad

we dont have a insanly high player base like USA or EU so we would all be on one server and if we are not then its going to be so shitty lack of players to do anything since cross Server instancing doesn't exist

[Apatheist]

One of positives about the classic map is that without all of the expansion zones, RDF, etc. reducing the density of bodies out in the world you don't actually need a ton of players by modern standards.

In fact, smaller server sizes combined with no character transfer/rename or cross-realm stuff were some of the most important "features" of the vanilla experience. You actually got to know your community. Your reputation mattered, it wasn't just a constant stream of random names popping up in an automated queue that you'd never see again.

Even in the unlikely event that only a few thousand subscribers stick with classic long-term, 2000+ characters is more than enough to make the world feel populated and support a healthy raiding environment. After all, the server cap during vanilla was around 2500. I'd guess that the real long-term classic population will be closer to tens of thousands which will be more than enough to populate several realms.

Not sure how Oceanic will work or even if there will be Oceanic servers for classic. If they lump English speakers from Australia in with players from Asia your ping will be better but I imagine it won't be much fun not being able to communicate with 80% of the server.

[Sservis]

Lets say on release Classic has the lowest participation ever of WoW in its history.

Ion announces an achievement for reaching 60 that earns you a full titanforged mythic raid gear reward in retail.

Classic has the highest participation ever and several minute queues to log in.

They've announced no achievements/transmog in Classic and no transfers from Classic to Modern. Personally, this is something I think they might change and allow achievements/transmog earned to escape to Modern accounts/characters as a way to increase participation. They also might not as it will piss off the Classic purists, question is if it's enough to be not worth the additional engagement.