Kevin Jordan’s whole thing in WoW was Class Design. In the Druid Countdown to Classic post, he said that his job was to come up with the concept and give it to some number crunching intern to make the numbers work.
I’m definitely not saying its the wrong attitude, far from it I wish there was more of it in Retail, but its understandable that he’s got a very different mindset to the lawyer who can’t define fun.
The whole running nothing but dungeons and world quests, is very hard to deal with.
Doing PvP use’d to be something I could enjoy when I took breaks while leveling, but with the whole exp in bgs started a horrible experience of bots running through out it.
We still don’t have true BfA numbers, just the vocal minority’s opinion.
That said, BfA is boring because there’s no server communities. Guilds with good communities are surviving, but otherwise its mostly a single player game with abusive NPCs in dungeons.
Then, you use: https://www.wowprogress.com/pve/us/illidan to get the number of guilds that have cleared the raid. Now, you do some guesswork. The maximum number of players in the raid is 30 and the minimum number is 10. Let’s say 21 players on average per guild have killed the boss now, you also need to account for some number of players that raid with pugs, so let’s add 5% to the number we get.
3.6% of all players with a level 120 character have cleared the recently released raid on Heroic.
About 3900 Guilds have cleared the raid on Heroic. 3900 x 21= 81,900 players
100/3.6 = 27.7 x 81,900 x 1.05 = 2,382,061 players, not including China that are subbed as of now.
This method is more accurate in the first week of the raid, as you can assume that everyone who clears the raid in the first week is subbed. It loses accuracy as time goes on and you have to estimate the number of casuals and bench players in guilds that are getting invited to kill the boss, and how many people have unsubbed.
I’ll accept that maybe it has some validity, though it completely ignores changes in subs in the 120s who aren’t raiding, since your baseline is “how many people ever got to 120”. But its still a lot of guesswork.
We all hear colloquially that BfA is dying, but even 2.5 million subs (since you’re not accounting for the non-120 subs) is still better than any other MMO out there.
I don’t need literal numbers to see that my entire server is a mere wisp of it’s former glory… It’s gone from High population to “new players”…
I am not the only one that notices this either, there are thousands of other’s just like me who also feel that Modern WoW has taken a serious wrong turn.
Compare marketing budget and development budget VS profit and get back too me on that one.
That’s what the company is going to be looking at. They will also be looking at stability of player base. I have a feeling that the player base of classic will be more stable after the dust settles.
Additionally the profit margin on Classic is going to be out of this world amazing for Blizzard.
Here is the problem you’re facing right now, this is the same problem Blizzard is facing right now… Apathy…
2.5 million, you’re right it’s great that’s a lot of people playing WoW…
The problem is they have a ton more servers now than they did in Classic WoW with only 33% of the population…
That server structure and number of servers is designed for the volume of players present in the middle of TBC when Blizzard thought they were going to keep expanding at Vanilla like rates… This is why certain servers took off and others were ghost towns because getting a server population going is hard.
The servers are in turn empty almost across the board excluding 5 or 6 realms per Geographical location.
If you’re not on one of the top 5 realms per region you’re not really playing World of WarCraft as it ought to be played.
Worse than this, the 2.5 million players is pitiful when compared to Vanilla, TBC, Wrath, Cata, even Panda WoW was killing it VS this…
Given Blizzard’s past and what they CAN produce when given the chance, I think it’s safe to say they’re failing miserably at game design right now and need to either A higher people who understand game design or B get out of the way.
I don’t disagree that retail has gone the wrong way. I’m just not declaring it dead, or even that Classic will outstrip it. “Almost everyone” implies that its basically dead.
Given CRZ, colocated servers and modern cloud infrastructure, they don’t actually separate physical architecture by server name any more. Neither will Classic. The server designations will be arbitrary separators of instances on a cloud platform where individual actions are independently calculated. Even if they have 400 realms, they may only need 50 servers to run that.
Except that you do see it. For example, on Hyjal where I’m having fun levelling with my partner, the cities look filled, we have to compete with people for low level drops and kills, and its easy to find a group. The difference is that 90% of the people I see aren’t from my server, and I’ll probably never see them again. That’s the retail issue. The current playerbase doesn’t see the dead server paradigm because everything is merged anyway. I actually found there to be more people visible in the Northern Barrens than I ever saw at one time after the first 6 months in Vanilla.
But Classic will suffer from the lack of players because the servers aren’t colocated and they don’t have CRZs.
BfA may not be kicking it, like it did in Wrath, but for the individual player experience, its by no means deserted.
I know very well how the servers actually work, however in Classic WoW there will be no CRZ, no Cross server grouping, no Sharding or any of that other nonsense.
It’s true that the servers are all virtual machines that get moved based on load and demand in an effort to keep the costs down, but the “servers” of classic will be their own bespoke VM’s without the cursed cross contamination of sharding (after the initial rush)
CRZ most certainly kills that feeling of community… Perhaps your server has been soft merged with a few other realms, mine is that way. I never saw the same people even weeks later while leveling; it was always new faces in both Legion and BFA.
It could, but the community will at least be alive in that you will know who people are. Blizzard can indeed avoid that fate to a degree by actually merging servers when the time is right. IMO a merged server where you meet new people who’re actually playing and can actually see those same people over and over; this is better than a soft merged server where you never see the same people ever again.
Sure if you’re into a mostly single player experience it’s dandy… The leveling experience was not all bad, but it would have been worlds better if the players you did see where actually in the same plane of existence the next day.
However all of this totally ignores the inexcusable and biggest failure of Modern WoW and that’s its Core game and Class designs; they are for the lack of diplomatic words “Unfortunate”.
I don’t disagree. I want Classic for a reason. The lack of community is the greatest factor in my disappointment in Retail.
The single player game, if it was billed as that, isn’t that bad. Its a little on the easy side and everyone is “The Champion” but the storyline etc is there. The problem becomes when you hit max level its either raid or reroll. There’s little to no engaging content there.
I just don’t see the “its all deserted” argument because their various technologies make it a heavily populated environment. We had at least 40 people waiting for the Caravan orc in Northern Barrens, because some night elf kept griefing it.