I don’t believe bringing cloning back will make any significant difference. The service has been gone for a while now and the main servers are full in terms of population and all kinds of player activity. Whether they bring it back or not will not be felt in the communities.
Also, Cloning was available at the beginning for $25 and almost nobody used it. If they bring it back for $25 or, now that “there’s interest”, for even more money… how many people will actually buy it instead of simply playing the characters they already have?
The chances of clones coming back is the same as them giving us real AV
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I paid for my two Horde characters when the service was available. Wasn’t sure if I wanted to pay for my Alliance characters so I left them while I unsubscribed for 15 months. Now I’m back, and I want to pay to clone my Alliance characters but I cannot.
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Good to see you are back and willing to pay for your clones.
I’m not disputing that there are people in your scenario. What I’m saying is that, since the servers are already full with people and activity, bringing the Cloning service back will not have an impact on the WoW Classic Era community.
Before this year’s Classic Era population growth explosion, and before the Cloning service had closed, we did lots of campaigning to remove or lower the cost of the Cloning service so that there was a low barrier to entry for people to play Classic Era since the population was so low (you had 1 guild per faction per cluster) and we needed more players. Removing the cost would allow players to come back and play without issue, thus making a huge impact in the small Era communities that played.
Now that there is no such issue with population, bringing Cloning back, while great for the cases like yours, does not impact the Era communities as a whole.
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I deeply regret not cloning my priest when I had the opportunity. I would be very grateful if we were given another opportunity to clone our characters.
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I’d pay for all my classic chars back if given the option.
You do realise the characters would be over two years old if they did bring back cloning?
Please for the love of god bring this back! Will pay top dollar. You have my mace, sword, axe, shield, bow, and HEALS!
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I don’t know what this is in response to but it’s kind of a weird thing to say.
Of course, people know that the characters are over two years old. TBH if I could get my Vanilla main back from before TBC I’d pay for that. That’s why I cloned in the first place.
You know, I don’t think they do.
Its ridiculous that this hasn’t been done already in the year 2023. We know they have the data, we know they could make a fortune on this. FIRE YOUR MARKETING TEAM AND RELEASE THIS. I WANT MY FULL PVP GEARED PALADIN BACK
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Yes, they would make money which suggests they actually don’t have the data anymore otherwise they would sell the service again.
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Of course they have the data, it’s just in cold storage. Companies that deal with user data hold onto it for a set amount of years before it’s gone forever. They are just too far gone into their story about it being “As gone as it can be”.
They need to just say “A lot are asking for our clone service to return, we heard you and so we have gone into our backups from 1 year ago to restore the deleted characters”
Here is Blizzard answering this topic directly 12 days ago. Sounds as though the data is just gone now.
Hindsight tells me they should have just given players their characters in both Era and TBC for free, it would have been way better for the population of Era servers in the long run if they didn’t try to squeeze us for $35 copies, which was eventually lowered in price twice. Remember people defended their choice to go with expensive, paid character copies, as if it was logistically impossible not to? That was dumb.
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“As gone as it can be” to me sounds like deleted from main game but not gone forever. Likely in cold storage for legal reasons for a couple years. Also some people have been able to restore characters from pre-TBC era, there is a thread that has the link to the reddit post where a few people were able to do it during the sketchy update.
Also i don’t like their response about how much data it was, they fluctuate from 1 billion to millions of accounts and say that technology is a limiting factor when we all know that data would have been a couple hundred TB’s at most. Pretty sure that’s not the dev team.
I have their own words it’s gone, where is your proof they still have it, I believe all you have is a complete guess. The data is actually a copy of the stuff they had on Wrath so why would they keep it.
It’s duplicated on wrath so why would they keep it?
You realise how much it costs to keep that much data? I doubt you do, they are not just stored on HDDs on a shelf. You have no idea of the laws covering data storage and the money it costs to be compliant with those.
People like you have to accept it’s gone and not coming back.
Actually I do.
The ISO 27001 compliance framework requires organizations to retain data logs for a minimum of three years. It’s a standard practice but blizzard doesn’t have to comply obviously. I like to believe they are careful our data though.
Archive storage services that google offers is $0.0012 per GB. I think Blizzard can manage.
That’s $0.0012 of lost shareholder value, an unacceptable expense
I would doubt that Blizzard would use Google, they will have their own server farms and the cost in electricity alone will be tens of thousands of dollars a year.
Remember Character data is not personally identifiable data so the statutes on it’s storage is not the same as the account data. As someone who got their data from Blizzard a few years ago under a GDPR request, I can say it gives you insights into how they store characters and personal data.
Is that $0.0012 per GB per day? Because that seems very, very low. 0.12 cents per GB.
Its also unfair because they presented it as if we had this important choice to make between Era and TBC, but it was impossible to make an informed decision, because we didn’t know the Era population was going to organically come back a year and a half later. That was unknowable.
Plus the initial $35 price tag, reduced to $15, then $5 once the service was near its end, it was such a slap in the face. I bought 3 copies at the $5 price but really messed up by not copying one of the characters I should have. Plus 2 of the ones I did copy were a bad choice, which wasn’t easy to see back then. The whole thing sucks, knee capping Era right when it comes out like that for some extra monetization.
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