There were too many small factors that came together to make wow classic fail as a long term version of the game. For one, it’s not new content in any way so everyone knows all the mechanics and how to exploit it. Two, the timegated releases were terrible because the game really needed bg’s and bwl to give enough content for people to do. Three, having an unchanging static version of the game is boring because you know your class is never going to receive any balance changes.
There’s honestly more things that are issues… back in vanilla realm forums built community, you had the pvp ranks on the website so you knew who was at the top, servers weren’t massive layer fests so you actually knew who people were on your server… it’s just not the same experience.
So, I think classic wow is dying and it will slowly die and bleed population mainly due to the lack of new/repeatable content and server communities not being built. And people will spam “you think you do but you dont” like they somehow won some personal war, but the real losers are us as far as mmo’s… because there’s no way I’m going to play retail again.
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Quite frankly TBC or WotLK would have been preferable to Classic.
If it fails, Blizzard would say—“See, Classic failed. You thought you did, but you didn’t.”
I think WotLK would have had a larger playerbase than Vanilla.
Edit: RuneScape tried RuneScape Classic in 2010-2011. I was part of it. It was fun, but died quickly. They resurrected the most popular time in the game’s existence with Old School RuneScape, which wasn’t Square 1, and it did significantly better. I think the same concept applies to WoW.
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Phase 2 is a failure.
Vanilla wasn’t designed to handle the population caps of Classic.
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Servers all have discords btw
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Seems pretty successful to me. I’ve played it every day since it came out, havent done that in a decade.
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Classic is fine.
The problem is, you can not replicate the true first-time experience a second time. Too many people latched on to classic as a means to magically fix everything they thought was broken in retail, and it was never going to do that.
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Here is the issue that I have with this line of thinking - Vanilla wow in its time was actually a good game. I played runescape and everquest before wow, so it wasn’t my first mmo. So this is always thrown around as “it’s just nostalgia, the game wasn’t as good”… but it wasn’t nostaglia, the game actually was a lot better in that time. And I also really liked wow classic up till I cleared ragnaros as well, but it failed in comparison to the vanilla experience as a long term game.
Retail is legitimately not good… and wow classic was better than that. It IS possible to make an mmo or to bring back a wow inspired by vanilla that is better than retail.
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So what makes a Game a “failure” is not adding new content? I mean, I think that’s the point of Classic, don’t you think? 
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I’d argue it was a great success.
Phase 2 is a bit of a failure because they have added in a reward for ganking .
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this is typical post from someone who dont even view whole game of players all having fun and think small segment of players who raced to ate up content is full representative of wow.
look at the constant whining from losing players in pvp servers. they posted the world is doomed every day forgetting that massive number of horde players extend their sub due to the fun steamrolling losers on pvp servers.
majority of subs are not even 60 and not every 60s are raiders or cared about pvp. It is been said back then by blizz that number of raiders are very small percentage of players.
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Indeed it is not.
I wonder whose responsibility that is.
Shadowlands pre-purchase says something like, “content available by December 2020.”
For what it’s worth, I liked how this post was a somewhat original take on the “I quit” post in that it made it seem like there was some well-thought out content in it, but it turns out, there’s not really any.
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I think one big issue is the lack of new players. This is a relaunch of a 15 year old game, anyone that wants to play it is basically already playing, there is not a constant stream of new people joining like there would be if this was a new game. So you have no incoming people, but you have people leaving from frustration/boredom/etc. That’s one of the main reasons why I think classic wont last its natural 2 year lifespan.
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“If its not perfect, its a failure”.
Gotcha
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Thanks for your own personal doom and gloom thread. We waited with quivering anticipation.
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Considering the runaway success it turned out to be financially, at least initially, I would disagree.
Blizzard will mishandle it into oblivion as they currently are doing, but it was an initial success.
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you do know this is subscription based game ? and blizzard take $$$ from subs instead from boxed game ?
what does that have to do with the game slowly dying?
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I was inspecting a level 60 with epics today and thought “what will this person do when their is no more epics to collect?”
PVP is something of course, BGs- but 3 BGs don’t last forever for most people. Another is low level quests, which most people won’t do either. I thought, the person will just quit. I think classic population will slowly fizzle. I’d bet 3 years max before the servers are shut off
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Classic WoW was a success for everyone.
For players who wanted Vanilla, they finally have it (mostly).
For players who say Vanilla is the best, they get to use this as evidence.
For players who wanted Retail, they see it as a failure.
For Blizzard who say “You think you do, but you don’t” they are right about most of the population, which is why they tried to keep all of the good, bad and ugly when making Classic.
Blizzard gained lots of sub money while destroying vanilla private servers
Players who hate all games and have outrage against all games get to bash two different versions of WoW.
Everyone wins.
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Classic wow isn’t failing, and it isn’t dying. It’s simply just weeding out all the retail scum who came here for the hype, and have been clogging up the server with horrendous queue times. In case you forgot, private servers thrived for years and it will be the same with classic. The core fan base who play classic for the pvp will be going no where because it’s actually a fun experience despite all its faults, especially considering that retail pvp is pure garbage and fights last anywhere from 20 minutes to forever /puke.
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