What if we all had to start over, and access to the Outlands and Kara was only possible through completing Naxx, and so on through the expansions?
The original argument for opening up the game was anti-elitism, and Blizz wants everyone to have access to end game. But if you were around back then you know it was more about trying to tap in to a burgeoning market.
How would you feel if the expansions halted, and the game was uninterrupted linear progression? Expansions would only come about after %5-%10 of the world reached end game.
Anything is possible but since they’re making Classic as authentic as they can then there will be a lot of people who can’t go without things like transmog, flying, hybrids that do competitive DPS, etc. and wont be playing Classic WoW.
Servers that progress through expansions also aren’t a bad idea but if they do it they should have some servers that stay on Classic forever, and be up front about which servers are which. Some people don’t want to go past the original game.
I’d also say it should be timed rather than based on end game. Not everybody feels the desire to push to clearing Naxx.
To answer your thread title.
Yes, it already has.
Why do you think they hid the subscription model behind Retail…
The only way to track the Original games numbers are via subscriptions…
Blizzard does not want us to know their subscription numbers anymore…because ahhh…well…they just aren’t as good…but they can hide lower subscriptions by then turning it into a represented dollar value of all of the digital products the remaining players buy…
Set and forget. No timers. You have to put in time and work to get to the next step. Which is done through defeating bosses, doing attunements, and other benchmarks. Stick to the plan and you’ll have an epic game. Deviate because $$$ or QQ, and you diminish loyalty. This has already been demonstrated.
The Vanilla WoW plan was never to attempt to force people into raiding. The incentive was that it offered the best gear, not that the game blocked progression on your character until you had done enough of it.
You have a point there. Perhaps the scaling needs to work so that in regular PvE everyone is capped at a certain level, and Raids are their own level and requirement?
However it could turn out to be, I’ve long been an advocate for seamless raid progression. I’ll never forget what it felt like when TBC came out. TBC was great, but I was only 7 months in to Vanilla and was looking forward to exploring that content. I felt cheated. Especially when you’re putting in 6-10 hours a day. If TBC was set up so that it was only for people who had made it to end game vanilla, then I’d have just been more motivated to persevere. Apparently seamless progression wasn’t possible then, due to poor scaling.
How’s that saying go about people remembering how you made them feel?
This is so false. Sub numbers are really not that important anymore. I don’t have a sub and I can still keep playing the game because I can buy a token with gold, which nets Blizzard more money.
I haven’t had an active sub in over a year. Many people play this way. Which would be ignored if only looking at subscriptions
This has the same problem of Blizzard’s current solution to flight: It doesn’t stop that content from becoming more or less irrelevant, it just forces the player to do it once before it does.
If you were going to redesign how the expansions worked, you’d probably be better off experimenting with the idea of using horizontal progression so that all level 60 content isn’t irrelevant the moment you hit Outlands and your raid epics are replaced with quest greens.
It was said the originally less than 1% of the playerbase did Naxxramas. Even if that were 5% in Classic, what you’d end up with by locking TBC behind it is content that virtually nobody is doing.
i think the idea of having the classic tbc expac be a different server you could copy your max level char over to (but still retain that same character on classic vanilla in its vanlla gear), resolves the “i’ve been robbed” feeling since you wouldnt be required to move to tbc to continue enjoying the top of the game. and your tbc self wouldn’t modify your vanilla self. each expac being its own entity that you could expand to if you wanted or not.
On the one hand, you can seamlessly move into the next tier of content.
On the other hand, if that server has a larger population of transfered max level characters it could put new players starting on said server in a tough position as they have to play a fair bit of catch up.
they’d have to level thru classic vanilla to access classic tbc, the same as everyone else, but once they did, any new characters they made could be made on classic vanilla or classic tbc (since classic tbc has its own copy of vanilla zones)
itd be:
classic vanilla
classic tbc + tbc’s vanilla
classic wotlk + wotlk’s vanilla and wotlk’s tbc
As for the success to come of classic J.R.R. Tolkien put it best.
“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”
Naxx was a bit ovetuned. Yes it was doable, but still a bit too hard.
Another problem was that greens obtained solo and in groups in TBC were too good and caused previous raid gear to obsolete much faster. Raid gear should only become obsolete by another raid gear, unless its like 30 levels difference.
So we would effectively need to:
Downtune Naxx - just a bit. The part with required 8 warrior only tanks was ridiculous.
Nerf solo and group gear from TBC down a bit
This would make Naxx more relevant, without making it a hard req.
The biggest concern I’d have with this is if I have 5 characters and 500 total gold, I can abuse the copy system to end up in TBC with 2500 gold by transferring all of my gold to a character before copying it.