There have been a few little deletions in old content with in WoW that created a small bit of anger from players. I am a little ticked that the quest path to get to fight Ordos was deleted.
The video game, Destiny, just deleted a whole expansion of their previous content, to make room for more.
Suppose WoW decided to delete say Classic and/or Burning Crusades from the Retail Client. TBC I could see, I have not quested in those zones in years. I believe that scaling is why. I still level in Classic Zones.
We have Classic and TBC Classic, now.
WoW is a huge game, I just wonder how it is maybe taxiing the hardware on the servers causing slow performance. I have seen some of this recently.
I mean they basically did delete Classic when they replaced everything in Cata
Personally I would go the opposite route and prefer for them to add all of that back in as an optional leveling Chromie Phase. Removing story quests from the game just makes it less cohesive.
While they’re at it, add back in the legendary questlines for MoP and WoD.
Keeping old continents running doesn’t add much strain due to how server resources are provisioned. Continents with a tiny handful of people on them are run on the smaller/cheaper cloud instances which cost pennies relative to the operating budget of something like WoW. They could keep the whole game (including removed bits) running indefinitely without noticeably increasing costs.
If you want to reduce demand on servers, you need to look at the combat system. Combat has become increasingly complex with each expansion, vastly increasing the number of calculations required while fighting, and that gets multiplied for every unit (player or NPC) on-screen, including pets. Toward the end of BfA with corruptions proccing procs proccing corruptions and other such nonsense, the total server load per character was absolutely insane, which is why it was so common for zones like Nazjatar and epic BGs to perform like they were being hosted on a Commodore 64.
Not even a commodore. It felt like you were getting hour old stock changes on early 1900s ticker paper. Genuinely ran several times across the zone while still stuck in combat. Just to see how far I could get.
And tbh I actually sort of liked it. Remember those times along with rank 4 essence grinds than anything else in bfa.
For some reason Isle of Conquest was particularly bad for me back then. Sometimes when the majority of both teams were clashing the latency would shoot up so high you’d swear the physical location of the server was somewhere on the moon. Almost impossible to fight that way.