Release new BC and WotLK servers, entirely separate from the original-Classic servers. They’re aware there’s some hope for this, and haven’t explicitly either confirmed or denied that they’re going to do it…so I’m hopeful.
Just maintain servers at 1.12, forever. No resets, no “seasons,” absolutely no updates.
Here is the “I won’t play if what they do is below this” threshold
Have the game “progress,” such that Classic servers turn into a-couple-expansions-behind-Modern servers.
Have the game “reset” in some way.
Add “new vanilla content,” turning the game into an alt-Modern, since Blizzard has already demonstrated the quality of the changes the current developers think make WoW a better game.
I would love to see classic implemented as the original developers would have wanted it without the time/hardware limitations. Maybe see the scrapped content and whatnot added later on down the road. I would love for classic to be a success and blizzard branch into servers for burning crusade and wrath and so on. Maybe where you can copy your character to the next expansion and continue your journey should you choose to do so.
I’m all for it because BC was my favorite time in wow besides vanilla and I loved wrath also. But the only issue I see here is that player base being split up. But then again I guess they could just have less servers to accommodate everyone and make sure it doesn’t feel empty.
This is well laid out. Only problem is blizz doesn’t communicate frequently and when they do it’s usually some double talk, choreographed Q/A that avoids real issues, or we’ve added something to spend money on.
That doesn’t lend itself well to a democratic voting system. Oh wait…
can we not just first get the classic servers up and running? I want more time than we were given with the original vanilla to play and keep playing in classic… Yeah. Some people will get bored with it but there are millions of people playing private servers right now that have played vanilla private servers for years.
To have classic and remain as classic I think will have absolutely 0 problems
Classic will be classic, nothing will change over time, nothing will be added.
If some one wants to play classic 2 years after it had been released that that will be possible. Or would people have to ask for classic again?
Its important to see this through Acti-Blizz’s eyes and keep in mind that at the end of the day, they are a company looking to do what all companies do : maximum profit with minimal expenses. Not a knock against them, just the reality of the situation. The recent investor call gave some insight as to where they see Classic fitting into their product line. Or more accurately where it doesn’t fit. They don’t see Classic as a major release, probably just a side project, new WoW feature or an experiment. Their opinion of Classic will obviously change as they start to get sub numbers and other metrics from Classic post launch.
With that starting position in mind , I see only a few ways that Acti-Blizz respond to varying levels of Classic WoW success.
Huge Success (OSRS-like 25%-75% split) : This is the hardest of possibilities to pin down long term, but in the short term its easy to see the clear choice for any company wanting to keep costs low, BC and Wotlk. Plenty of people are clamoring for these x-pacs now, and getting them up and running is easy and cheap compared to developing all new content. Blizz has stated before that patch dev time takes a lot of manpower and can even delay the development of expacs. We haven’t had any indication that its the case with Classic development though (Level designers, modelers, quest devs ect. being unnecessary). While Classic has a seperate dev team now, if they were to need these kinds of resources it would more than likely take away from retails development. While not unlikely if Classic reaches this level of success, I cant imagine Acti-Blizz wanting to move devs off retail. I find it more likely that they would simply re-evaluate gameplay design in retail and develop the next retail expac to be more in line with Classic design, but with a 25%-75% split its not out of the question. Also possible at this level is a soft reboot of the game, a post WotLK expac in which the Cataclysm never occurred or played out very differently. It would be absolutely possible with the majority of a player base playing Classic to even merge the two games with this expac (just write some time travel plot line into retail) to minimize dev demand.
Moderate Success (<50% but still significant): At this level its somewhat unlikely that any post WotLK content would be produced. It would still make good business sense to release the old expacs, but after that I think they would look at releasing fresh servers or attempting to implement some sort of seasonal system(both topics for another thread). This would make Classic a viable product for as long as their is demand for it with minimal resources being allocated.
Minimal Success to failure: I might be being optimistic, but even if Classic pulls in pitiful numbers I cant see them shutting down the servers. It solves too many issues for the higher ups at Acti-Blizz. At this level Classic only fresh servers are what we will probably get.
Tldr: If it does better than retail: Probably Bc, Wotlk, then maybe a new Xpac for retail in the same vein as Classic. Anything else and we probably wont get any completely new content.
Reminds me of the back to the future 2 movie. Where are all the flying cars and hover boards?
It all sounds good on paper, but all those points will keep moving the carrot on a stick. They all remove an end goal, where you feel like yep just need to do this and I’m done. Even the separate progression server, it will half the community and then you either move forward or stay on server with no people rerolling alts etc.
I wouldn’t mind only classic no new content. I wouldn’t mind only classic servers with content and without on separate server.
One realistic solution I see and that is a voting system, like a 90% required + max level character on classic server + content cleared(they still track these things even if we don’t have a website or achievement telling us) for the vote to clear. This is assuming they won’t give us classic and classic+ separate.
I think you leave it alone. If people are tired of farming Naxx, go play something else.
“New old content” means it’s not fulfilling it’s original purpose anymore; it’s just another Warcraft MMO. This isn’t supposed to be that; it’s just a museum piece.