That only gets you so far, Maurothi. One need only look at OSRS to see the concept in action. They brought back Runescape, as it was, with no changes or new content. It was fine, for a time, and then people got bored and started to leave, even though RS was far more sandboxy and open-ended than WoW has ever been. Then they started adding in content, decided on by their player base, and it was a hit.
Communities don’t exist in a vacuum. The idea that Classic, unchanging forever, will somehow miraculously have millions return and stay there for years on end without new content is delusional. Just because there are things that you can do, doesn’t mean that you necessarily have any interest in them. One need only look at BFA to see that. There are plenty of things to do. Island expeditions, incursions, world quests, dungeons, raids, Mythic+, arenas, BGs, war mode PvP… and yet people can’t bring themselves to care, because it all feels dull, like the stuff they’ve done a hundred times before.
Incorrect. Pretty much the only MMO that’s had any recent growth has been Final Fantasy.
You know what most of those people like to play? Phone games…
No, games don’t follow a linear growth rate forever. They ramp up to their peak, people start losing interest because it’s the same thing over and over again, then they drop off. They follow a bell curve.
I do have an argument, it’s called looking at this topic from an objective standpoint. I’m allowed to be on the classic forums regardless of my standpoint. This forum isn’t only for people who delusional fantasies. I /played ~150 days during vanilla and enjoyed it. I will be playing classic, I’m just going into it with a reasonable set of expectations.
It’s been a slow death so far because of expansions and inertia but this is a major change which will knock down the population of Retail suddenly and drastically. I believe it will have serious consequences to the overall health of the franchise.
This has been said before, many times, by each of the so-called WoW-killers. Each time, there was a flash in the pan, but they were not able to keep the momentum going long enough to damage WoW.
They’ll be able to do that but most people are going to give one up in order to level and raid in the other. Sure, some people may go back to Retail for a bit each week but they’re certainly not going to participate like they were before Classic was released.
Retail has been slowly but surely losing players, this is going to accelerate that process. Classic is a rehash of an old game, it will bring people back but most of them have done it all already - and for multiple characters! How many more times can they keep their interest up? It will die off and faster than the first time when the game was new and unexplored.
We shall see what happens but my prediction is that Classic will be the Retail killer and then people will get bored of Classic before long too.
I don’t think you understand what a strawman fallacy is, but nice strawman. He made the claim that WoW dropped off in a growing market because the direction was poor. That, in itself, is a fallacy of it’s own. I stated the facts that games do not follow a linear growth forever. That’s a fact backed up by statistics.
I’m fully aware that it’s not 2004 anymore, thank Xenu for that.
Yes, a lot, if not most, games tend to collapse into a smoldering brown dwarf of diehard people that remain obsessed with them until the end of days. Just look at the people who sit around for 12 hours a day practicing speedruns of games that were on the NES.
It shares a subscription with retail WoW, meaning anyone signing up for one props up the other, making it less of a competition for WoW, and more of a ride-along.
And, if the crowd that is avidly against TBC or Classic+ getting added in have their way, then Classic will go the way of the other WoW-killers with only dead servers remaining up and running, a tool Blizzard can use to hammer private servers with.
I hear you. Once we have Classic we have it. The “wanting” and “craving” dissipates as we delve into a 15 year old game. That said, no one can truly predict what the future holds. We have our feelings and our hunches, but that can only take us so far.
However, comparing Classic to retail is a stale fallacy now. Retail may have “a lot of stuff to do”, but how much of that stuff is actually worthwhile? Is it fun? Meaningful? Engaging? To me it was just a chore. In Classic the work I did had lasting benefits, in PVE, PVP, professions, you name it.
Comparing Classic to Runescape also isn’t viable for two reasons:
(And most importantly) they didn’t revive the REAL classic 2D runescape. They revived the 3D abomination that took over the 2D Classic.
Although they are “MMORPGs”, they are on very different levels of MMORPG. Everquest or SWG is what you’re looking for.
First off, how markets flow is determined by the consumer. So making a suggestion that consumers do not appreciate product trends leading to a fallout of popularity is in line with economic theory.
So to suggest otherwise, based on what appears to be 101 knowledge of statistics is in fact a strawman. You are inventing an argument he isn’t making.
In fact, the fact that you know that statistics even exists on the subject, invariably suggest you don’t know what they represent in the first place.
Did you just seriously compare Starcraft to a Twitch trend?
While it isn’t a direct correlation, there are enough similarities between the two situations that we can draw some conclusions from OSRS’s example. You are correct that one cannot perfectly predict the future, but certain behaviors are predictable, especially when we see multiple examples from various sources trending to the same theme.
As for comparisons to retail, my point was that having something available to do does not correlate to having a desire to do that thing. For instance, I have no interest in PvP, other than an occasional For the Horde raid. And I’ll never be a hardcore raider. So having PvP or Naxxramas out there isn’t going to do anything for me. PvE and professions have some fun to it, but there is a rate of diminishing returns, especially when you get to higher levels, your skill is maxed out, and so on. Sure, I could run alts, but there are only so many ways you can level an alt, even from different races/factions, meaning that there are level ranges where you’ll be doing the same content once again. Any Horde character is going to funnel through either Silverpine Forest or the Barrens, for instance. How many times can you do the Zevra hoof quest without going insane?
I think it’s fair to say that in general across all forms of media re releases of products/games/movies/books/music never achieve their original popularity.