Your needless response to my original post was petty and unoriginal, why should I apply effort in my reply to it? You do not deserve my best.
Also, if you play many alts, but chose a human warlock as the face of your forum presentation… it shows enough, you dastardly fiend.
Whatever you say dim bulb.
See? That one I like! You fel addicted cur!
Cata is the most fun I’ve had playing a classic version of the game… coming from a NON retail player.
I liked lk. Cata I didn’t get out of the LFR community in original.
There’s literally nothing stopping you from rolling on an Era server right now.
Same here.
I haven’t played retail since like 2 years ago and I was Classic-exclusive for like 3 years before that. I played Shadowlands for just a few weeks to level up and check things out and haven’t been back to retail since.
Cata was my favorite version of WoW from a class design and storytelling perspective. I started in late Wrath…was probably one of the last to level up in the “old world” for the first time. Hit level 80 literally just a few weeks before the Cata pre-patch.
For me, it’s the version of the game I’m most nostalgic for and the one that feels the most like what WoW is to me. I love it.
That said though, I had a lot of fun leveling through original Classic, then BC classic…I sat out most of Lich King classic, but I definitely came back for Cata.
I don’t even really like “Vanilla”, it’s pure nostalgia. After having played through it a couple of times, it’s a pain in the…gluteus maximus.
I liked TBC, but Outlands was a such a PITA to level through. At least the Wrath zones weren’t too bad.
The player population has been dwindling down since vanilla brother. It’s Shot up during Covid because people were locked down, after the lockdown got lifted the player base has been dropping by around 20% each year. I would say it doesn’t really have anything to do with Cata and more to do with adults decided there are more important things to do with their time since they aren’t being stuck in their homes anymore. Some found remote jobs to prolong that decision, some took up college classes from home and were working on degrees through different grants and programs that started during covid, now that most of those time frames have ended what left is the die hard WoW addicts that aren’t simply just killing time but play for pure enjoyment of the game.
I wouldn’t say 150k active raiders in the NA is a failed expansion. That’s 1.5-2 million a year in subs for a project that costs them a third of that to launch and maintain and that is just the North American servers. That doesn’t even include shop sales of new boosts, xfers, name changes, faction changes, or mounts which new expansions always bring along. At the end of the day they probably flipped a 500% or higher profit on what was invested, far from a failed business venture.
Bro we all played classic when it relaunched in 2019. It was epic and everything we wanted it to be. It’s over now. SoD sucks, cata is starting to peeter out. Enjoy raidlogging cata until you quit the game and move on with life. Realistically the magical feeling started to wear out in Sunwell of TBC.
It’s the honest truth. Classic vanilla in 2019 was a resurgence for everyone, not just the core classic players. You’re simply not going to recapture that feeling with new fresh servers, and comparing the idea to 2019 classic is as disingenuous as comparing cata’s population to era.
That being said, I do think periodic fresh Vanilla servers aren’t a bad idea for that considerably smaller population. I don’t think they’ll play anything else anyway and it’s a pretty low effort bone to throw them (unless I’m mistaken).
As long as the Era servers stay so that we can keep our progress fresh for those who’d like this is a fine idea, I would not go there, but I’d welcome the idea, just as I’d welcome TBC and Wrath Era servers.
Those still playing Era are the “real” classic lovers, and we have fun there. I guess most of us now and then dip our toes in other waters (Cata, Retail, other games entirely) but we always return back “home”.
This right here is the problem for Blizzard. I would say the majority of players feel this way. We got to relive it again and now it’s lost it’s sparkle since the nostalgia high wore off. Players want something new now not a repeat of something they just did a few years ago. Cata in spite of being a re-release is something that hasn’t been played for 12 years, vs wotlk that we just left or TBC that was 3-4 years ago and vanilla 6 years ago. Players would also still prefer to play MoP classic rather than going back to vanilla/tbc/wotlk because again… it’s something new that they haven’t seen for 10 or so years.
They won’t do it when the majority of the player base won’t play it. It’s a waste of their resources, which is my biggest issue with the idea. It would pull away devs working on cata bugs and fixes, something that already is abundantly clear that they need a larger work force for. I don’t want it thinned down more than it already is.
Do fresh Vanilla servers really require pulling devs away from other resources in any significant way? There’s about 20k regular players in Era last I checked Ironforge.pro and no real dev work to do to service them the smallest thing.
I feel like expecting them to leave and go to Cata/MoP/retail instead of just giving them a fresh server is a bad gambit, personally. I think Blizzard’s dev work on Cata/SoD/Era proved that all their decisions are no longer catered only to the majority now (who still only play retail btw)
Vanilla fresh server not really outside of doing the ground work for setting the whole baseline of it up. Vanilla/TBC/WoTLK Seasonal servers though which would be more interesting for them to do absolutely would.
No dev team is going to vote on “Yes all I want to do is bug fixes and provide no creativity to my job what so ever”. That’s why the SoD team was so large and very enthusiastic compared to most of the classic teams, something interesting that they could play around with. The project proposal just briefly thinking about it wouldn’t yield a high enough guaranteed profit either for board members to just make them do it.
Just thinking about what it would take though… designing a seasonal schedule, timeline, how they handle season starts with new servers, adding their own changes to spice seasonals up so they don’t stay bland, how they handle character migrations on season end, will vanilla characters be able to migrate between TBC and Wotlk Era, etc. It would honestly probably take them a couple months to lay the ground work for it with a decent sized team and another couple of months between seasons to figure stuff out.
(By seasonal servers I don’t mean SoD equivilent, since it’s called season of discovery. I’m talking about rolling resets on classic servers more like D2 ladder resets where they add in a few new items, or spice up boss mechanics in different raids for the seasons, etc.)
But if we are talking about would it pull devs away from cata for TBC Era and Wotlk Era? yes absolutely. Both of those classic releases had bug fixes happening a week before the following expansions released. Devs would have to continue working on those bugs for those expansions.
Oh, you misunderstood me. I play Era solely. I do not want fresh for me, or even Cata. I would play TBC only if it was a forever server, no seasonal or fresh here.
The pop of classic has been pretty consistent from when the classic vanilla population stabilized, with some spikes for launch hype of TBC and wrath. Cata is actually the first one to have a big decline, so you’re simply wrong.
People were not stuck in their homes anymore 1 year into vanilla and the pop didn’t collapse. Your hypothesis is disproven by numbers.
Factor in here that cataclysm has a lot more appeal to retail players and has a lot more retail players that previous classic iterations. So that 150k is a lot lower if you only consider classic exclusive players, who are the only ones who matter for classic’s financial return since retail is on the same sub.
But onto the main point, yes cata’s numbers are high enough for blizzard to make a respectable profit, especially for a game that took almost no development time or resources, it’s considerably less succesful than the trilogy. Cata alienates the audience that wanted classic in the first place, and investing in fresh for the trilogy and/or an actual, proper classic+.
Sunwell was peak of the classic WoW’smagic. Prenerf sunwell is the greatest raid in WoW history.
At this point I’d take era numbers and cut by half.
Logs are per char. So a safe assumption is that is 10k players with 2 chars at a minimum.
Now being fair, the same could be said for cata. But cata is hazy. I don’t raid log. So I am not even a number, but…
I have 2 85s, about to 85 a third…and I have dk at 83 sleeping at an inn lol. So I get my hours played in.
You can also find non-raiding Era players 
