oh it takes a long time to level up in retail now if you dont buy the perks and boosts. i played several hours yesterday in outlands levels on a different character, and several hours the day before, and the day before, and the day before, and still wasn’t leveled out of it. i didnt run any dungeons, however.
I get your point, but your categorization is just wrong imo. There’s a lot of nuanced things we can talk about that are different between retail and classic, and I like them for different reasons, but neither one is more RPG than the other. That distinction is as silly as trying to pretend AD&D 3.5 is more of a RPG than D&D 4.0. It’s going to piss off people who liked the later editions and appeal to the people who liked the older edition while providing nothing substantive to the discussion.
it won’t. classic’s popularity will attract people who see two games for the price of one. this will help both games. the only thing that’ll kill retail is retail.
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I’m looking forward to the excuses people come up with after it hasn’t overtaken retail 6 months later like it wasn’t authentic enough or today’s gamers rants.
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Retail will absolutely take a big hit. How long that lasts remains to be seen.
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i needed quiver and arrows on my hunter, portal stones on my mage (2 different kinds), seeds on my druid, poisons on my rogue, ankhs on my shaman, candles on my priest etc. i had to feed my hunter pet and train it. i had to train weapon skills. the npcs and vendors all had a function that related directly to game play and not just as something you run passed.
etc
wont upset me at all, as i want classic to be a big hit.
/shrug i mean most of that just amounted to grocery shopping though.
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And? I’m in the beta. I’ve got a 40 hunter, 40 warlock, 32 pally, 23 warrior. Those things don’t make it more of an RPG or retail less of an RPG for not having them. Is Rifts more of an RPG because it’s a more complicated system than D&D? What about GURPS? You’re making a distinction that’s silly and you’re doubling down on it. Just curious, which version of the game do you prefer? Retail or Classic? If your answer is what I think it probably is then we know why you’re trying to pretend that Classic is more of an RPG than retail.
I kind of feel like we are moving to the point where every discussion has been had, beta has been winding down, now we just waiting for the release to see what happens. At this point whatever happens will happen. I’m going to play until it gets boring.
classic is my favorite. actually tbc to be specific. hopefully classic will be so popular that we get tbc classic too.
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Ah, so it’s just your bias showing through and that’s why you’re pretending that Classic is more of an RPG than retail. That explains that ![:slight_smile:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=6" ":slight_smile:")
classic is more of a rpg than retail. definitely. retail is more of an adventure game with some league of legends style play
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What immerses a player into the world is subjective. If that’s what you need to feel immersed, tedium and grocery shopping, more power to you. That doesn’t make it more or less of an RPG. That just tells us about you as a person.
Negatively. How much depends. I think more than people expect will stay for a good while. After Naxx there may be a second drop-off as content begins to run dry for some.
Layering might put a lot of players off early on. Either because they don’t expect it coming into Classic or because they’ve never experienced WoW without similar tech and therefore don’t realize that experience will come to Classic eventually.
its not so much tedium, it’s delayed gratification. that’s how i translate it, anyway.
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A developer who works on AAA title releases doesn’t want to dedicate resources developing something that is going to move fewer than a million units. If it is in that domain, it isn’t AAA. Sure, it may be profitable all the same, but it isn’t really “worthy” of AAA level attention, and that in turn leads to branding problems for Blizzard. But as I said, I don’t think Retail is there yet, but that is on a definite trajectory to end up there.
As to the 15 year lifespan it already has enjoyed? Definitely that was highly unexpected. Anybody who predicted such a thing 15 years ago would have been considered insane. But the MMO market was still a (comparatively) new thing then, and had barely been tapped, as WoW’s explosive growth from 2004 through 2009 demonstrated.
No it is called extrapolation, and it is only delusional if I’m the only one expressing such thoughts, I’m not alone in this. They changed the gameplay, often by a LOT in many cases. The priest I’m posting on is obviously still a priest in the retail game today. But the priest she is today is not anything resembling the one she was even in 2009. The class changed, game mechanics changed. It is similar, many of the spells even have the same names, but they behave differently, do different things, and the list goes on and on.
It is rather off-putting to “Return to a game” after a number of years, and discover the game you thought you would return to doesn’t exist. Sure there is one by the same name, but it isn’t the same thing.
The other thing you’re ignoring is my position clearly is not delusional as Blizzard themselves is the one rewinding the clock on this.
If you dig further in my posting history, you’ll also see my commenting that Blizzard trying to make retail “more like Classic” would be a mistake. That obviously isn’t what the current player base has become accustomed to, it isn’t what they expect, changing things in that direction is only going to serve to alienate the existing player base, while likewise being highly likely to fail to lure back the people interested in Classic.
Whatever they do to try to retain the Classic players after they’ve exhausted themselves of Classic Content needs to happen “on a different path” than the one Retail is on. (Which isn’t to say integration is out of the question, they just need to be clear as to presence of “a fork in the road”)
I actually agree with a number of your points. I expect there is potential for an absolutely huge number of players trying their hand at Classic. I also expect a corresponding sharp decline in population.
I may disgaree in regards to certain specific details, as I think the population will be a bit more stable between phases than you do(although I agree that noticeable declines will happen, I don’t think they’ll be as spiky as it is on Private servers). As you’re forgetting about certain other social aspects of Vanilla gameplay. The private servers do provide indicators of what kind of trends are likely to play out though.
Now building on the previous point, “life priority changes” are what made me stop raiding, and ultimately my cessation of play. Changes to gameplay over the intervening years have kept me from bothering to invest myself in coming back in any kind of serious way. The only reason my subscription remained active after those explorations was because Classic WoW had been announced and I wanted to help support that. That just also meant I have an active account that allows me periodically putz around in Retail when the fancy strikes me. (And evidently helped me get in the Beta, much like you did)
I’m sure it is. Because that’s just another attempt to be insultive to people who like a system you don’t using a hot button word. “I like RPG games, you guys like Fortnite and LoL!” “I don’t want instant gratification, I want delayed gratification!” It’s so memey. Are you going to go on a rant about millenials and entitlement now?
Of course it is because the game is 15 years old. You glossed over the point entirely. Show me a game that sustains initial WoW-like numbers forever. But we know you can’t do that because none do. They all age and die out eventually. Over a long period of time. And there’s literally nothing they can do to keep gamers interested forever because a lot of why people move on from games like WoW has absolutely nothing to do with the game.
That’s called confirmation bias btw, not extrapolation. The only data we have on the subject (from pservers) shows that there’s going to be a massively sharp decline once people start completing content and run out of stuff to do. The reality is I think the often mocked commentary of, “you think you do but you don’t” is going to pan out to be true. I’ve firsthand seen a lot of people quit the beta because they couldn’t handle the reality that their nostalgia told them they wanted. I’m sure it will keep enough people engaged to be considered a “success” but that bar is very, very low. I don’t think we’re going to see millions return and stay. Those people are gone and they aren’t coming back for reasons that have nothing to do with the game.
Retail is likely to be dwarfed by Classic for the first couple months more likely than not. What remains to be seen is how much staying power Classic has after the initial influx of players.
Remember, that by the end of Wrath of the Lich King over 100 million accounts had been created(I’m sure a third of that is gold seller accounts though). Peak subscription was “only” between 12 and 13 million, but that doesn’t account for the millions of people who stopped playing in Vanilla and never came back, or the ones who only played during TBC, or the people who played Vanilla and TBC, but quit before Wrath, and so on.
The potential “returning player pool” is absolutely massive, it’s just a question of why they quit, what their circumstances now are, and how long it takes for even a significant fraction of them to come and visit. This also ignores the player base which only existed between Cataclysm and the present day who have never experienced this content before.
i play retail, too. trying to think of an example. i can play a quick game of something, or a long game of something. for example, i can run sunken temple on retail in lfd group in about 15 minutes or less. in vanilla, sunken temple was much bigger and took alot longer, not only to gather up players (people feared it cause it was not the easiest dungeon), to then run there on foot/ground mount, but also to finish all the objectives.