I do not normally post more than a few sentences and I doubt this will be read by anybody willing or able to make a decision but, I think there’s a fundamental disconnect between what you’re describing as a healthy community and what actually makes a community meaningful in Classic WoW, and your attention to the whims of streamers and inability to understand the deeper parts of what made vanilla and classic such meaningful games in people’s lives, will ultimately lead to the failure of forever.
You talk about needing a critical mass of players to encourage social interactions and emergent behavior. But those things aren’t simply products of population size. They’re products of familiarity, consistency, and shared experiences. Your sharding or layering contribute to these problems on a fundamental level of misunderstanding of a simple concept. The world that people talk about, when they talk fondly about the game, includes community.
One of the defining features of the original WoW experience was repeatedly encountering the same people. You recognized the warrior who helped you finish a quest three levels ago. You remembered the rogue who killed you in Stranglethorn Vale. You knew which guilds controlled certain areas, which players could be trusted, and which ones had reputations that preceded them, you knew the people you were buying from at the ah or saw on the Ironforge bridge.
Those relationships developed organically because you inhabited a persistent world with a recognizable population.
Now compare that with the feedback about Forever’s layering system. Players describe being moved between layers when joining or leaving groups, disappearing from one another at zone boundaries, and being unable to reliably participate in ongoing world PvP encounters.
I understand that layering is being adjusted and improved. But technical improvements to population distribution aren’t necessarily improvements to community formation, and it seems like you have failed to actually understand the heart of that.
There’s a meaningful difference between a system designed to ensure you encounter enough people and one that ensures you repeatedly encounter the same people.
And that distinction is particularly important for RP-PvP. The entire appeal of that environment is the persistent relationships, rivalries, reputations, and player-created stories that develop over time.
You cite Grobbulus as an exception and point to other RP-PvP servers as evidence that the community isn’t sustainable. But have you examined whether those servers failed because players rejected RP-PvP, or because the conditions necessary to sustain those communities disappeared?
Crusader Strike is a great example of the “unintended consequences” of a decision y’all made without actually understanding the decisions you’re making. When you force a bunch of people (streamers and their communities) to pre-choose where to meet, without an alternative they choose the path of least resistance…. And somehow that is the RP-PVP rulesets fault. Then to fix that mistake you hurriedly make a new server to split a community on a seasonal realm. This is serious flaw, in your explanation.
I did not play on grobbulus. I have never played on an rp-pvp server before really. But, I have played this game off and on for 20+ years. I played the game that made most of the people here fall in love with it… before it became the mess that retail is. The lesson you should take from retail… the failure that retail had that ended the beauty of vanilla was removing community. Dungeon finder, raid finder, sharding, layers. All of it flies in the face of the one value you say you want to uphold and I have no faith at this point that you will be able to actually understand what that means. The world is the main character… only if there is community in it.
Finally, there’s also an apparent inconsistency in how different communities’ requests are being treated.
When prominent streamers want features that support their preferred way of playing, including a dedicated arena for their dueling tournaments, those requests seem to receive serious consideration and accommodation.
Yet when the RP-PvP community asks for an environment that supports its preferred way of playing, suddenly the conversation becomes about population statistics, fragmentation, and whether the community is large enough to justify it.
Why is accommodating a streamer-driven event worth the development effort, while accommodating an entire community’s preferred style of play is treated as an unreasonable risk?
I’m not suggesting streamers shouldn’t have their events or that their communities don’t matter. I’m asking why the same willingness to accommodate different playstyles doesn’t appear to extend to RP-PvP players.They don’t drive views? Did you make the game so that a bunch of visitors can sign up for a month or two and then not play, and you hope that they forget they are paying the subscription?.
If the philosophy behind Forever is to preserve and celebrate what made Classic special, shouldn’t that include the communities that made their own stories rather than simply the ones with the largest audiences?
I don’t dispute that population matters. An empty server cannot sustain a community. But neither can an enormous population that never develops a shared identity.
The magic of Classic wasn’t walking into Stormwind and seeing 500 strangers.
It was walking into Stormwind and recognizing 50 people.
And frankly, it’s difficult to accept that there’s room to accommodate a streamer’s dueling tournament but not room to seriously explore preserving one of the most distinctive communities Classic ever produced. It doesn’t give me hope you all have this figured out. I hope you do. This game, like many people here, has been a part of my life for more than half of my life… listening to people that love it, instead of love the money they make from it my actually benefit your design.