Right on. I foresee myself taking breaks every now and then to avoid that kind of exhaustion, but it also depends on whether my friends or guild members still play too. At the very least it is very very comforting knowing that no matter how long I go on break, the same game will be there whenever I want it again.
Point of order: Many books, music, and works of art become vastly more popular and valuable after the creator is dead.
And, for others, that concept is far from comforting, since it means that they have nothing to look forward to. Especially considering that one of the main things everyone talks about in Vanilla is the community. An eternally unchanging Classic will have all the community of a hospice center.
Yep to very narrow sets of collectors, not to the population at large.
Shakespeare, Rembrandt, daVinci, Mozart, Beethoven, Sir Conan Arthur Doyle, HG Wells, Isaac Asimov, Sun Tzu, Plato, Confucius, and JRR Tolkein would all like to have a word with you.
I wouldn’t consider any of those re releases. They’re things that have been in production continuously since their release.
Classic isn’t even out yet. That’s something to look forward to (if you liked Vanilla, anyway).
But again, we can sit and discuss the future with endless viable theories without knowing for sure what WoW Classic will look like when all the phases are out. What remains to be seen is the impact Classic has on the community and whether it can prove itself to be more than just a nostalgia trip. Some are hopeful, some aren’t.
And they are considered “classics” because of their quality. Case closed?
I agree with this. It’s the closest thing we have to measure. Everyone predicting drop off is guessing.
Lol, of course there will be some drop off. It’s a 15 year old game that basically ends (Naxx)
It’s fine though, the people really interested in Classic are all about the whole experience, so they’ll still play regardless.
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Yes I think classic will remain as relevant as all of those things, a small group of dedicated people will continue to enjoy it. And just like those things it will never achieve the same success as its peak.
Now if you’re making the argument that those things never peaked they are already inherently unlike WoW.
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True enough. I am hopeful that it will be more than just a nostalgia trip, but all signs point against it if it remains a sterile museum piece forever. Human/Group psychology, economic trends, comparisons to similar products, and so on all indicate that, if there is no new content (or at least server resets) after Naxxramas falls, then odds are seriously against the community in Classic surviving for long once the drought sets in. And for those who think the community is the most important part of Classic, that is the same as Classic being dead, even if they keep its animated corpse hanging around like a scarecrow to ward off private servers from stealing their IP.
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Actually, all of them had periods of decreased or non-existent production at some point in their spans, and all are remembered primarily for being far greater in popularity after their deaths than during their creators’ lifetimes.
Correct. You put a product out, if that product has demand, people start buying said product, if product is worthy, then the popularity spreads and will typically follow a curve. When the potential consumer base starts reaching saturation, sales will taper off.
In general, there are only so many potential people that are going to be interested in an MMO. That means you have a relatively finite pool of consumers. Your job then becomes trying to suck them in. Over the past 15 years, most people that are into MMOs have probably tried WoW at one point or another. However, sometimes, MMOs gain new players like some little kid that just discovered them. On the flip-side, someone might lose interest in them. The overall trend is that the playerbase remains around a relatively stable size of people.
Random example: Selling farm equipment. You probably aren’t going to sell a tractor to a person in the city that doesn’t own a farm… There are only so many farmers in the nation and only so many people that might eventually become a farmer. Therefore, you can’t expect to sell 327 million tractors, just because there are that many people in the United States. The same goes with the gamerbase. Only so many people are actually interested in MMOs, and of that percentage, only so many are going to be interested in WoW. Of that percentage of a percentage, only so many are going to remain interested in the same game year after year.
He said: “The fact that WoW dropped off in a growing market says something about the direction of the game and how poorly it was developed over time.” which is a fallacy and I gave the more logical explanation as to why it really dropped off. His argument is akin to saying “The planet is getting hotter because there are more yellow cars on the road today than there were 100 years ago!” aka a causation/correlation mix-up.
For one, I’m an electromechanical engineer, so I’m very used to looking at statistical data. Not only for product trends, but also for the actual process of engineering. Two, I happen to work in the game industry right now. Yeah, weird jump, but logic is logic and it doesn’t matter if I’m working on a drone or a mob’s AI in a video game, etc etc, it’s all the same crap: Logic.
Umm people have been replaying old video games ever since I can remember and I’m only 32… Speed running and record setting was a thing long before twitch… Twitch just gave those kinds of people a podium to do it from. My point was that some people remain diehard fans of old games. Personally, every year or two, I replay through some old SNES rpgs like Secret of Mana and FF6. I know quite a few other people who do the same. Does that mean if they were re-released today that they would be smash hits? Nope…
lots of tourists will quit around level 20-30, after that will be the people that burned themselves out trying to grind to 60 instead of just having fun, then it’ll be the people who finish the raids. Once they have all the gear, there’s really nothing left to do.
Classic has a finite lifespan, OG Vanilla lasted 2 years. I’ll be surprised if Classic lasts as long as that before there’s a sharp decline in players.
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Okay and we’ll see in what maybe a 100 years if WoW is in that group? Based on things that are re released in a much shorter time span yeah… not seeing classic even breaking the 1 million mark.
Personally I think a 100 years from now people are more likely to remember pac man or mario or street fighter or the WC RTS as games for all times.
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I understand that there will of course be an initial ‘drop off’ from tourists just stopping in to see the sights and finding it wasn’t for them.
But as retail gets progressively worse (Blizz has shown their inability to address issues brought up by large portions of the playerbase - artifact knowledge, etc. etc.) and folks get more established on Classic, we will see a rise in Classic players.
Again, once guilds establish themselves, folks get to level 60 and begin to stockpile mats, gold, etc. It will become easier for new Classic players to get care packages to help them level and enjoy content, thus boosting the amount of sustained players.
I agree with the finite lifespan. Once the Nax patch drops it has 6 months max before totally dead. You can only play the same content getting progressively more powerful for so long before it gets stale.
We have about 2 years of content and bliss. After that they will either be reset, we will have TBC, Or some form of Classic+.
What people forget about private servers is that most people who played it played on servers that reset periodically, or they jumped to another private server that was new.
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Indeed. Which is why people are talking about what form that will take now, since dev times to make content means they’d pretty much need to start working on it around now for it to be ready.
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i dont think there is that much interest in mmorpgs any more either. the fortnite generation couldnt care less
older generations are tired of it or dont have the time
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every game has a finite life span unless they keep releasing content. classic wont be doing that
private servers have a few thousand people still going. thats hardly worth mentioning in 2019
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