When you make a claim, you need to back it up.
The raid frames look that way because they are a result of the coding that was used to create Classic WoW.
That aesthetic, however, is minor. I am talking gameplay, the way thegame is programmed and how it plays. How it is designed.
It playsjust like vanilla. Down to the naked rogue killing ability
There is absolutely no reason to play this patch. The content sucks and the gear looks absolutely dreadful.
…Oh and still no PvP vendors. Unbelievable.
My claim was that classic wow isnt the same as vanilla wow. I did back up my claim by presenting a differnce.
Being similar doesn’t mean they are the same thing. At this point your trying to create your own definition that says classic wow is vanilla wow if you disregard any differences that you tell us to disregard.
It plays similarly to vanilla wow but not the same. Also there are bugs with rogues with vanish and their artificial system of spell batching.
Classic isn’t hurting retail. Retail is hurting retail. If anything Classic is a life preserver for retail right now.
Classic wow is hurting retail it is directly competing against its player base for the same players. It is also competing for company development resources.
I don’t think so. Many players activated a sub specifically to play Classic. And a fair few people have actually taken a break from Classic to play BfA because they have the gear they want from the current content and are waiting for the next phase to activate.
It was very clever of them to include the Classic game as part of the WoW sub because players who want to play Classic are counted as subscriptions even if they never play BfA, and sometimes they even do.
And they have said at least a couple of times that Classic has an entirely separate development team and does impact on retail at all.
Unless they make them Allied races in Shadowlands, me either.
No it isn’t. Now that the retail tourists are largely gone from Classic, you won’t see any of us in retail again. And I sincerely hope, vice versa.
Then we will need the numbers on it. If the numbers say “retail players are quiting retail to play classic” then blizzard is going to focus more of their development resources on classic and less on retail.
If classic is the main draw and retail a secondary curiosity then that means more resources on classic.
If classic cost less to develop and has a greater return in extended subs. That says “Hey we are paying bob the same salary as jeff but its taking him months to get stuff done in retail” but jeff can get more stuff done in classic in half the time, because he doesnt have to create original content he can just copy and past".
So you move bob over to classic pay him the same amount but he gets more done in classic which means we are extending subs at a greater rate even though we are paying him the same amount if he worked on retail.
If Retail WoW was any good, very few people would be still playing Classic. They would have visited Classic and then come back to current content IF BfA was fun.
Last official number we had was around ~7.5 million in WoD.
There is no reason to believe the numbers have gone up from there.
Not sure whether that 1.7m number is accurate or not, however MMO’s require large populations to be sustainable.
There is a breaking point at which point everything feels empty and people will just start quitting as a result. Finding groups takes forever, guild start falling apart, servers look/feel empty, AH items seldom move, etc., etc.
That breaking point number is much higher than you think.
The last activision stockholders meeting in 2019 was mainly them raving about how much of a massive success classic wow was, to current and potential stock buyers. If I recall correctly they said it was 3 million new subs but someone would have to fact check that.
Except for those of us who have enjoyed Vanilla for these many years and who clamored for Classic.
Retail tourists are largely gone from Classic servers now, thank god and our communities are really starting to gel.
Retail? Hopelessly mud-whimped, SL will not cure it.
You don’t need a weatherman to tell you it’s raining. Retail servers are empty and populated solely by CRZ and that’s not because there are 7.5 million players.
Oh I believe you. I’m just saying we have no official numbers. I’d say the numbers are fairly low.
Especially considering the emphasis on store mounts and “lock-in” promotions.
This game really needs housing or some sort of meta objective to work towards outside of “new patch, grind gear that will inevitably become pointless, add 3 camels to your 6000 mounts you don’t use, everything gets reset, repeat ad infinitum”. Every patch largely invalidates what you’ve done before and expansions even moreso. Eventually the feedback loop breaks down and it all feels pointless without some consistent endgame feature to build towards. I feel like the issue has just become more obvious as the grind has moved away from getting interesting cosmetics to getting bis rng gear that’ll immediately become worthless in the next update.
They actually talk about all that stuff in the 2019 stockholders meeting and mention official numbers, but someone needs to find that vod for us.
I know but they don’t give numbers anymore. It’s usually vague speak.
“Expansion is doing better than previous xpac during this phase in it’s lifetime” - stuff like that or they talk about MAUs.
A nebulous term that is pretty easy to “fudge”.
A million MAUs in a game designed to be super grindy … sure. That doesn’t mean engagement is good, or players will stay subbed, etc. Then couple that with releasing patches at a convenient time (i.e. just before last measurement ahead of Qx yearly earnings call).
It is Blizzard taking advantage of “clever use of game mechanics”.
Which it is dude.
Classic WoW was designed to be everything that Vanilla WoW was at the time.
Classic WoW is NOT TBC and WotLK. Otherwise, it stops being Classic, and starts being retail. The entire purpose of Classic was to replicate Vanilla.
Congrats, you found that the raid frames are not the exact same as those in Vanilla. Weird flex but sure.
Found
around min 2:30 they say classic brought back millions of players.
around 5:15 mins they say classic increased a record breaking number of subscription plans for that quarter.
Yeah Its all pretty vague. But indicated WoW is actually in a healthy place.
9:38 it says theres 33 million blizzard users. and says WoW doubled in existing and prior subs thanks to classic. They say WoW classic has added the most subs more than any other quarter ever has.
15:31 they say that the operating margin is 19% for blizzard. Blizzard roughly made 394 million at a cost of 74 million.
27:40 they say they had to make a significant investment in the development team to make wow Classic happen. And the goal of classic is to make up for pre-expansion gameplay droughts.
So basically they made are choosing to develop wow classic to make up for droughts in retail. That means instead developing more retail they are developing classic instead.