Classic should go live in sync with the release of a major BFA content patch.
Of course, Classic will have many players dipping in and out of playing, checking it out when they’re bored w/ BFA or just once capped for the week.
Ideally, Classic will launch when BFA is most active, thereby diverting less interested players from clogging servers on the first couple weeks of launch.
Not sure if they’re planning this or not, but I think this minor timing decision could pay dividends for server stability and establishing strong server communities and guilds in the first couple months of Classic, ensuring there are less players overall from Live that do not intend to stay engaged.
I absolutely agree that doing this would go a long way toward, at the very least, reducing the need for sharding.
Of course, we’ll see many posts from retail players as to why that won’t work.
IMO, the true reason for those retail player’s objections is that they do no want to actually have to choose one of the two games in which they feel they will “fall behind”.
If Blizzard is going to go ahead with sharding anyway, they probably want as many people playing Classic as they can get so they wont want to release it alongside a BfA patch.
Otherwise yeah, it would be a good idea to limit the surge of players at the start.
ActiBlizz will do whatever makes its shareholders the most money which would be to provide a subscription incentive (Classic) when their retail subs are suffering (during a content drought).
They certainly disregarded it, but I think for players and Blizz it was ideal to see well populated, well-balanced servers—it just wasn’t happening anymore and they chose a priority that didn’t line up w/ player priorities
I used to think this way, but now I think it can be argued both ways, to be honest. By launching Classic in such a way that it would ease an initial rush of “tourists” and potentially alleviate a need for sharding, they could be making more sub money in the long term. People on the fence about returning might be more likely to come back, and Classic would be healthier overall for when the curious retail tourist devour their patch content and decide to come over and check things out.
Oh, who am I kidding; they’ll just brute force everything like they always do and dump the release right when the retailers are bored to tears. Classic will launch and Trade chat will be filled with trolls from retail whining about how everything sucks.
That’s the exact opposite of what they’re going to do. The point of shared subs is that classic content drops will drop in the dead center of the development cycle. Classic drops “summer 2019”, retail is on a 2 year expansion cycle and guess when the halfway point between expansions is?
If sharding and explosive population at launch that is expected to dwindle in 30 to 90 days is of actual concern, then yes, I think that a strategic delay is worth it in the long run.
Do you think that after over 10 years many of us would care if it took a couple more months? They should never have given a release window, but that was for retail player benefit, not ours.