You all have been on this doom and gloom of Blizzard being in trouble for having their 15 year old version of the game being a deathknell of the retail.
This isn’t true. Its free content for them. They don’t have to create it. It doesn’t need artists, it doesn’t need musicians, it doesn’t need voice actors. Its been bought and paid for and they get to make money on it all over again.
All they have to do is fix a few bugs and manage servers. That’s peanuts compared to making resources. Anyone who’s worked on a game project can tell you that resources is the most time consuming and expensive part of any game.
And there’s the whole thing of Everquest doing this for the last 13 years. Arguably their progression servers (which makes up at least 60% of their population if not more) have been profitable for them and probably paying for their 25 expansions themselves.
Here’s what classic does:
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It brings back players who are not playing retail. That’s money they didn’t have before.
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It keeps players who are playing retail paying inbetween content. Frequently players will play through a content phase of an expansion, do the new dungeons and raids, and then unsub until more comes out. This keeps them subbed as they can do classic inbetween content phases. You will see a dip in classic population as patches on retail comes out.
This doom and gloom has no basis in reality. There’s other real world examples already out there. If Daybreak’s Everquest can survive 20 years, and have 25 expansions, with 13 of that being progression servers. Then WoW will probably be fine.
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I highly highly suspect it had more to do with gold seller using auto /who to invite people to channels and for server load than for any anti-population reasoning. Heck - they’d want to brag over so many people - not the inverse.
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I understand that you’re using statistics terms, but all you’re really saying is that the data is bad. You’re not providing any reasons for why it’s bad. And I don’t think any of us are in a positions to speak on the differences in server architecture between classic and live. That is… unless you actually work for Blizzard???
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Several Measurements fall outside of a reasonable tolerance. Like a server being 99% horde/ally for example. That’s obviously not true.
Probably because they don’t need whiny nerds screaming about they can’t possibly log into the game if the faction balance isn’t 50/50.
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Because the numbers are plummeting at a very high rate.
They made a really stupid business move by splitting up the very little people still playing WoW in general.
Pretty soon both versions will be on life support.
If Blizzard cared about census, they wouldn’t have left it alone for 15 years.
They wanted to break something else, and census was just collateral damage.
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I highly suspect it was the mega-servers with layering having so many auto inquiries to server but mostly to stop low level chars from being able to /who and send out invites to gold channels.
I enjoyed seeing the consesus sites, I thought it was interesting, even if inaccurate it still was interesting. did I care about faction/class/race imbalances, not really. I just found it fascinating to see what the majority of people were doing, trying to understand why most chose a certain race, or faction.
all that said, its broken now and thats fine as well. sucks I dont get to see the interesting information I enjoyed, but its not a deal breaker.
see my comment here Addons can no longer use /who functionality - #149 by Censushorde-area-52
As the maintainer for CensusPlus and the only in beta mode ClassicCensusPlus I can say much of what I have read in this thread is pure bunk.
Warcrafrealms dot com has never claimed to track all characters because we knew the truth. There were never enough users of the addon to capture all of the data, and there never could be enough.
Also (see the other thread) anyone who did just a cursory look at the reported data would see that was the case.
If you go and look at the most wanted realms and submissions list you will see that more then half of project mainline (aka retail) realms only get censused once or twice a month!
It is my belief that the real targets were the gold seller people, who took the core functions from CensusPlus instead of writing their own to make the chat/invite bots.
Years ago when I first realized those bots were using my code, I was dismayed.
But after further reflection, I realized that Blizzard was the one who made it possible and they could make it not possible at any time.
With Mainline they still run with the philosophy they settled on years ago,
With Classic, well we have a different set of devs who have decided it was easier to just use a big hammer to drive deep that small nail.
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Is there any status on an update/work around to get the mod working again?
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There has been steady and widespread work to see what can be done under the new rules.
Unfortunately because there is money and status involved the Gold Sellers and (auto/semi-auto) Guild inviters have already uploaded functional code. So they are back in business as usual for all intents and purposes.
It is a sad commentary that the most player intrusive addons are showing up first.
The long existing CensusPlus and never out of beta ClassicCensusPlus are in redesign stage. As we wish to keep the addon as non-impactful as possible, both to the user of the addon and the player base in general, which has always been our design goal.
The fork of CensusPlus, CensusPlusClassic which was active on the Classic realms, appears to be ready for testing and use.
In my opinion it is rather rough around the edges, and certain design changes make it unusable for the WarcraftRealms data aggregation site.
One of the big differences between our addons and the fork or other data collectors is that we are focused on the Character and the Characters history. Incidental information about faction, race, class are just that, incidental.
One of the sites biggest query usage is by Guild officers to see how active and stable new recruits are when they ask to join the guild.
A character that takes forever to level is obviously not being played often, this might be a problem for a guild attempting to speed to end game raid level and expects significant time commitments from their members.
Another character that regularly jumps from one guild to another to another… is also an indication that the player of that character might be a problem for the guild.
What will Blizzard do when soon the data gathering and usage both in game and out are back in business is only known by the company.
If in truth some how this one api call (that they created and use) can somehow impact server performance, then they already have ( and had for years) a solution… drop the query packets from the offending clients until performance returns to acceptable levels.
IF the problem is all together something else… well they will do what they will do.
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you can’t handle the truth.
Its pretty simple, Census would allow shareholders to track the sales performance and the growth of the world of Warcraft product by the number of players that are playing which is not the best way to track blizz performance when we consider all the in-game purchases.(character boost, cosmetic, mounts pets, etc.). Not to mention some players are paying for their sub using gold. Census might throw off investors in a panic and might paint the wrong picture.
I think a part of it has to do with how much traffic their API servers can handle. Doing mass /who probably was more API calls than they wanted any single addon calling, then multiply that by how many people would have it installed. They are probably also trying to keep costs / server headroom down, in addition to all the other answers in here.
With some add-ons that use while others abuse /who. Blizzard chooses the handle the issue like a blundering ogre instead of the finesse of a marksman hunter.
Because the player base doesn’t really need to know that info. Does the player no good.
The data they had from the past helped me find old guildies from long ago and those who are playing classic.
Seriously? THIS community? The WoW forum “community” rips Blizzard apart for any and every possible excuse. If they can’t find something to criticize, they make stuff up.
Blizzard has a LOT of experience with this. They released WoW numbers in their quarterly reports for 12 years or so. They saw the thousands of forum posts which used those numbers to criticize Blizzard.
Why on earth would they allow something that people use to hurt them (and don’t use for anything useful)?
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