I have seen several posts detailing what people believe are conspiracies by Blizzard to sabotage Classic so that people will play Shadowlands instead.
While I would normally dismiss those as just conspiracies, it does raise an interesting question that I was curious about: How many of you would be done playing World of Warcraft if Blizzard, either through action or inaction, turned Classic into a dumpster fire?
For myself, I have no interest in Shadowlands. I believe Blizzard peaked with Legion and after fighting the Legion and the mad Titan Sargeras himself, there really is no place to go but down as far as epic content goes. If they somehow made Classic completely unplayable or unenjoyable, I would just have to find myself another MMORPG to play.
Anyone else in this same boat? I was just curious as to how many share this opinion. And while I highly doubt Blizzard will ever read this (nor do I have any idea if they would actually care) I thought it would be interesting to see the response.
I don’t mind a reinvention but that was not trying to be original. Creating aspect of the viper which brings down damage in return for mana regeneration was at least a novel idea. I consider that a better iteration
Melee swinging survival pvp spec hunters with energy bars just seem like rogues with pets and no stealth. Or did they get stealth too in the form of camo? I know blizz decided to make all the classes homogeneous in an effort to balance the game better which still didn’t work. Which is pretty much retail’s biggest shortcoming for me personally
my interest in shadowlands tanked after i saw beta footage. the continued mismanagement of classic has completely destroyed my trust in this company. the blizzard we all loved is dead. this is just a weekend at bernie’s installment with activision puppeting its decaying corpse.
Likewise. I remember reading about the introduction levelling experience and actually being interested. It sounded like it may be getting back to its roots… until I got to the part where the author detailed getting into a vehicle and mowing down undead by the dozen at level 10, and my eyes completely glazed over.
I never bought the theory because I think Classic was inspired by their IP department: dont sue the private servers, profit off the reboot concept and soak players on the fence, while preserving the IP.
Blizzard got a nice bump from it, but internationally, Blizzard cannot afford to ditch retail. A new xpac will continue to release until 5G VR in about 3-5 years where it will get a total facelift.
(As for your informal survey)
I will play the crap out of Shadowlands if I have time, over Classic, and would have regardless because Classic progression is in a weird place: on one hand its predictable and gated behind warrior groups, and on the other, TBC looms to vitiate nearly all of it.
Those theories about Blizzard sabotaging Classic to drum up subs for Retail are absolutely nonsense, which anybody with the faintest marketing knowledge could tell you.
Blizzard definitely wants to increase subs for Retail, no doubt about it. There is also definitely a partial overlap between the people who re-subbed for Classic and people who might be interested in Shadowlands. If Blizzard wanted to get serious about courting this new demographic, they’d offer additional Retail incentives to returning Classic players: free mounts / pets, extra level boosts, beta keys, etc. But as this thread has demonstrated, there is also a demographic of returning players who have no interest in Retail - not necessarily because it’s a bad game, but because it’s a different game and they’re not interested in it.
By sabotaging Classic, Blizzard would at best cannibalize a demographic they already have, and alienate the returning non-retail player base, which is a net loss for them. Furthermore, as a publicly listed company, you’d have investors and stakeholders throwing themselves out the window if somebody seriously suggested a marketing strategy revolving around intentionally damaging their own brand. Blizzard may be out of touch, but they’re not insane.
It’s a cute idea, but it instantly makes zero sense the moment you start to think about it.
Yeah, I know. There are a LOT of things wrong with Classic at the moment and Blizzard’s determination or laissez faire attitude to continually allow people to exploit the game frankly amazes me. Fortunately, at least for the moment, most of the exploiting, RMT, gold selling, botting, multi-boxing, and such do not affect me too much in the game. I was fortunate enough to find a great guild to play with and we are having fun re-living some of the old times from way back when with respects to raids and such.
Yeah, this is one of the shortcoming for me with respects to Retail as well. I went from my role being a Mage to just being one DPS of many with nothing really to outline me as being different from any other DPS.
I honestly hope this isn’t true, but the more I see of both inaction on Blizzard’s side combined with some really strange decisions on their part (server number sizes, layering, removing layering to allow login queues) the more I sense you may be right.
Blizzard stands to gain nothing from sabotaging classic. They’d lose far more subscribers than they’d gain in shadow lands. It’s just idiotic people who hate retail thinking that’s the only thing blizzard cares about. It’s not, they don’t stand to make the most money by only caring about one product over another.
Given you didn’t explain yourself, I’ll give you what “Dumpster fire” means to me and why I would add another 204 accounts to my multiboxing team. This is the number of accounts that my current computer systems can run with WoW Classic clients.
“Dumpster fire” means to me that Blizzard fixed everything in WoW Classic to be exactly like the way it was during the years 2005 to end of 2006. This means the /follow command works as it should in battlegrounds.
I have no interest in Shadowlands at all given the number of changes that made it difficult for my play style.
If Classic were to somehow die, or if they do not do a TBC Classic, then I’m done with Blizzard games. Classic is the only thing left that I enjoy from Blizzard. I’m 100% done with Retail forever, no matter what they promise, and their other games are just dead.
I’m not sure about Blizzard’s “care level” for Classic so much as their “care approach” to it. They seem to be using the same parameters they have for Retail for Classic and the games are two very different entities. Just not sure they really understand that.
I purposefully left that open to interpretation because it means different things to different people. For some, the game is about playing a version of WoW they did not play back in 2004. For others, it is a chance to re-live what they played back then. For some, it is a chance to exploit the game for resources or gold or push the boundaries of botting and multi-boxing to see if Blizzard even notices or cares. For others, it is an attempt at world firsts even though those events happened long ago.
While I am not happy with the level of exploiting that Blizzard has allowed, it hasn’t adversely affected my enjoyment of the game and I have found a really good guild to play the game with. However, if the exploits get to the point that I cannot enjoy the game and/or the server queue times turn into what the poor Arugal folks are seeing right now due to Blizzard not maintaining any sort of decent population controls on the server, then I would have to unsubscribe and move on.
