How will classic affect retail server population?

lol vanilla wasn’t that hard. everything was just ungodly long grind.

Compared to EQ it was a cake-walk which meant the grind wasn’t as grindy.

At this point they need to make a lot of good decisions to craft themselves a bionic foot for current WoW to have a leg to stand on though.

Most the players I know still playing live BFA enjoys it, and most said they have no interest in going back in time.

I was a GM of very active pvp guild Mop-Wod… and 90% quit the game not the guild in Legions. The few I know playing joined raid guilds. Plus to me I see some similarity with Classic and the live game, then say TBC and even MOP.

Classic plus BFA both are mainly driven to PVE for top gears… were there was no separation with type of gears…Pvp during other expacs having Res/Pvp Power etc.
Making us gods in pvp situations and gearing was faster if you had arena partners to cap each week, which only took a few hours a week.

So obviously the players playing BFA currently, probably will remain and not care about the Implements I mentioned above. If I was into raiding and mainly pve BFA would still be my game.

Edited: or play both.

I hope it WRECKS retail numbers and sends a very clear message.

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I disagree. I think many people will who stick their toes in will get hit with the original magic of wow. Especially those who never experienced questing in the original old world, Yes it was harder, yes it took longer, yeah it was tedious, but you felt so much more personal satisfaction. I think a lot more people will discover the joy of a real mmo and retail will bleed because of it

shareholders (thus activision) will care only about subcount. And it will rise, they’ll be happy

Classic will give retail players something to do during content droughts.

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Vanilla was boring a lot of the time, this is true. However, it was a lot better than what we have now. I don’t play retail so if I quit vanilla I wouldn’t go play retail. More likely I would just take a break from vanilla and come back in a couple months after i’m tired of another game.

This is the main thing that is important - vanilla has lasting appeal that will make people come back and play it even with no content. They may not stay perma subbed for 20 years but they will come back and play many times over breaks. These people will not play retail wow, they will play other games.

Mannoroth is a day 1 release server.

Mannoroth had free realm migrations offered off of it in Vanilla, TBC, and again in Wrath that I can recall.

In Wrath and Cataclysm, it wasn’t unusual to see over 2,000 people online playing Alliance.

Mannoroth is now a merged realm with two other realms(both created on TBC’s launch).

That merged realm has a combined population that I haven’t seen go above 200 players present on a Census+ sweep for the Alliance whenever I log in to screw around with the Garrison activities in WoD. Be that at 9am in the morning, or 7PM on a weeknight.

I just checked the horde side of things, and their numbers look a little bit better, but based on what I just saw, I’d be surprised to find more than 300 people online later tonight.

Please do explain how World of Warcraft is alive and well when I’m looking at not 1 dead realm, but 3 dead realms with histories dating back to well before the peak of WoW’s subscriber population.

Or how so many other players from realms which are not part of my combined realm, seem to be observing comparable levels of extreme population decline on their own respective realms? It doesn’t seem to be isolated, it actually seems to be rather common. That isn’t the sign of a healthy player population.

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Cool, have you an opinion. Better is not objective, it’s subjective. And to be honest I don’t care what your opinion is. Unlike you I’m playing both and I can tell you that the bulk of players don’t make it past level 15. I know because half my guild roster (over 400 characters) stopped there and haven’t logged in since. These are people who went out of their way to opt into a beta. I know many, many people who have gotten angry or upset or frustrated that have quit not because they didn’t want to invest into the beta, but because their rose colored glasses were suddenly cleared up and they realized they didn’t want to play it anymore.

I’m sure Classic will have a fanbase, but it’s not going to negatively impact retail in the long term. The people that actually want Classic as a primary game over what we have live are people who aren’t happy with the way things are on live and probably aren’t playing as is. Hell, there are people in this thread that have admitted in other discussions that they are only subbed now because they wanted an opportunity to get into Classic beta.

Right, that’s the sign of a game that’s 15 years old. Just because the population is lower doesn’t mean it’s dead. Wanna know how many people played EQ at it’s height back in the day? A bit over half a million, nowhere near WoW. Wanna know how many people are still playing today? About 40,000, far below the millions still playing WoW globally. EverQuest still releases expansions. WoW isn’t going away anytime soon and if you think it is you’re delusional.

I mean retail is maybe a 15-30 minute a day commitment for the most part? I think the people playing retail will still just do that but instead of logging out of WoW altogether they’ll play some classic.

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This is giving me Austin Powers flashbacks.

“Why make Billions when you can make Millions?”

I agree that it is unlikely that WoW (Retail) is going to close up shop anytime in the next several years. Although they may start devoting increasingly fewer development resources towards it if the trend continues.

The bigger part of this is Blizzard knows a larger audience is possible, and they want that larger audience. They know a number of design choices either drove players away, or is otherwise keeping them disengaged. If they’re not wanting to fix that, something is very wrong.

They’re a AAA Game developer. They don’t want their headline MMO to be boasting fewer than a million subscriptions when it once boasted well beyond that.

i think retail will be fine but will take an initial hit. the reason i say it’ll be fine is, once tourists from retail leave classic, the influx of people that aren’t wow players currently, will likely try both and settle on the one they like best. if they like things like league of legends or fortnite, they’ll settle on retail, if they like rpgs and mmorpgs, they’ll settle on classic. two different types of games. and some will play both.

Honestly think if someone is that hard up for $15 a month maybe they should spend a little less time gaming & a little more either working, or looking for a job. Far cheaper then going to the movies and lasts a month. At least it hasn’t been changed for inflation over the years.

Of course it is, because you believe what you want to be true and thus you see it everywhere. Here’s an example:

The reality is that’s just your bias coming through. I literally know no one who quit over game system changes. I know tons of people who quit because their life/priorities changed in the past 15 years. You have zero data showing why people stopped playing and yet you immediately assume it’s because of changes to the game that you don’t like. I mean, hell, you made the point…

And you’re right. Something is very wrong. With your assumption that they can just magically wave a wand, turn the game back to the point YOU liked the systems, and everyone will come back. That’s called a delusion fyi.

So what AAA game has anyone developed that you can point at that lasted longer than 15 years with a population in the millions? Are you really going to pretend that they don’t know and expect that WoW’s population is going to decline? Or that they’re not developing it with the experience and expertise to know when to put games into maintenance mode? WoW isn’t there yet and it’s not going to be there for a long, long time. When they think they can develop a game that will capture most of those subscribers that have moved on they will. But most likely they won’t because gamers don’t want what we want in a game anymore. That’s why they have Overwatch and Heroes and Hearthstone. They’re marketing to a larger audience that they already have in other games anyways while trying to retain the players of WoW as long as possible. But I mean, clearly as an internet armchair developer you know all this already right? Right?

This assumption is pretty wrong. I exclusively play classic but like league of legends a lot. You can like rpgs and more fast paced games as well.

generally-speaking. like rpgs are different than league of legends, if you get my meaning.

i’m not saying that i think retail is that interesting to me, nor that i would like it more than classic. retail definitely needs help. i’m just saying that classic wont be the death of retail.

if anything the devs will roll it into something more classic like. but they’d have to be careful as to not change the game so much that their current players (who are not that interested in the rpg aspects of vanilla era) dont leave cause the game changed too much.

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I honestly think retail mostly attracts casual gamers who like mount collecting and pets with some achievement hunting. Classic is a more hardcore experience, so a lot of people who like fortnight and league would be more likely to play classic. Retail is for people who play an hour a day.

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Retail rats saying classic won’t tank BFA playerpool and are not worried but floating around classic forums instead of BFA forums ThinkingFace

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