I’d imagine the players who play Retail at the moment enjoy it and won’t make a mass exodus to Classic servers.
I know a lot of players commented on the Forums they stopped playing Retail and are coming back for Classic (I know I’m one) so I’d guess that Retail will continue to hemorrhage players slowly but I don’t think too many people who enjoy Retail will like Classic and switch to stay on the 60 side.
I for one am never going back to retail.
Everyone I know who is looking forward to classic is not currently playing BFA. The people I know playing BFA have turned up their noses at classic and said “I’ve already played that game.”
But as a previous poster said, only time will tell. People might flock in droves to classic because all their friends who quit came back for it. Who knows.
Prevailing theory is they stopped reporting numbers because the population was in decline. Their own numbers up to that point reflected that. Chances are, if the numbers went above that last reported number, and they had no reason to expect it decline anytime “soon” they probably would report the numbers again.
Of course, Activision has shifted to a different reporting metric since then, so even the guy logged into Diablo 3 now counts as a customer in the quarterly reports even if he never buys anything.
well, if you want immersion in a game, and you have the option to be instantly ported to a dungeon with an insta-group or have to trek there with a group you formed, whats more immersive? also your group you formed yourself, is gonna be presumably friendlier cause their rep is on the line.
i don’t think people really understand their own expectations. I don’t enjoy retail wow, if classic doesn’t renew my love of the game, i’ll hang up my hat on trying.
It will take me at least a couple months to max level. I plan on pvp’ding mostly, and will probably raid rarely. If they go with a bc drop and then a wotlk drop, i really don’t want to re-live that repetition, i left because i hate how the things i worked for were so temporary.
how long will I be interested using the same weapons and gear? I don’t know, but i am keeping my expectations lower. I remember a lot from 2004 and it wasn’t as great as people remember. A lot of the qol changes over time were nice. I personally feel the level cap increases, and ilvl progression ruined it , at least for me.
Which would be the social aspect of Vanilla. I think people are underestimating this part of things, especially the Retail boosters. The social aspect of the game is huge, if you’re not engaged in that, then yeah, walking away is going to be easy enough.
I’ve seen “hype” from people in real life, something I haven’t heard for retail in a VERY long while. Old guildies are contacting one another; kids who I introduced to WoW and who are now young adults are excited to play and asking if I’m going to play too; I’ve discovered 5 people at work who are all excited for Classic, 4 who I didn’t even know gamed. I’ve chatted with random people (checkout cashiers, our lawn guy’s son, a dude walking his dogs) and the topic turned to gaming, then WoW… they’re all planning to play Classic.
I’m not a sociable person. If I’m running across people outside my normal circle looking forward to it, there is a LOT of hype outside the forums.
That being said, I don’t think it will drastically reduce retail’s numbers, except for maybe the first couple weeks when tourists stop by. Who knows, though.
game just got too big and had to start streamlining everything to keep the endgame within sight. they eventually gave up on that when people complained that it was too easy. so they put slow leveling back into tbc and wotlk zones and people complained about that. so they settled on a middle ground and just offered a level boost on the game store. ![:grin:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/grin.png?v=6" ":grin:")
Bingo. They aren’t going to report anything that allows people to pit retail against classic in any way, shape, or form. They’re just going to give us large, meaningless numbers that we have no way to correlate with anything to show off (i.e. X amount of copies of an expansion sold in 24 hours!). But I don’t care what the prevailing theory by a bunch of tin foil hat wearing people is about why they stopped reporting those numbers. They’re also the same people telling everyone that Classic is going to kill retail lol.
What’s more immersive? Getting instantly teleported to a dungeon and running it or sitting in Stormwind for 2 hours spamming general trying to find a tank and when you finally get one realizing you have 30 minutes left and you can’t even get to the instance in the that time frame so you log out after doing absolutely nothing?
The reputation part I dig, a lot actually. It’s one of the reasons why I’m in Classic in the first place. The server being populated by people I know because I see them on the regular is a great thing. The problem is people quit. Server communities shrink over time. New blood is not something WoW is getting much of anymore. That means as people get to the end and stop playing (i.e. they’ve farmed out all the content they can reasonably do or they get BiS or they just lose interest because they’ve invested 50+ hours and haven’t even gotten to the level cap) they’re going to have absolutely nothing to look forward to and they’re going to quit just like they do on pservers. I wish I had an answer to this population problem because I recognize why they did server merges and connected realms and phasing/sharding and all that, but I miss people having a reputation. I know what the good is of each system and the bad, and there’s really no reconciling the systems. Either one has large problems and change fundamental aspects of gameplay/social networks in their respective systems. I want the meaningfulness of the old style with the sustainability of the new systems but that’s just not possible.
fair point! immersion, however, isn’t necessarily going to be easy. like lets say you’re writing the chronicles of nyl and nyl is about to embark on a journey to some location where an ancient artifact resides. the quest giver has instructed nyl in advance, that the journey and destination are exceedingly dangerous and suggests nyl take a group with him of at least 5 people.
so nyl sets about the first step in his journey, gathering his group. this turns out to be more difficult than he expected, as it seems the place has a bad reputation and people fear it.
compare that to nyl clicks a button and his group magically appears, in just the right combination and they’re all magically ported to the location but it doesnt even go to the trouble of showing it as magical. i mean, immersion would suggest there be some explanation as to how they all got there and met each other so fortuitously
Interesting comments, thanks.
Haha time flies!
If this is the path they take, I hope they don’t make the same mistakes that Cataclysm made. I don’t think that overhaul was successful, for many reasons that have been discussed elsewhere.
But yea as you mentioned, Classic gives them a chance to purge overlapping content. And the real version of the content is available there not some gutted version of it.
There’s definitely a chance for them to pick and choose what has worked and what hasn’t from post vanilla expansions. There’s some obvious flops like LFD but then there’s some winners like flying, flex raids and class halls.
I thought this since somewhere in the Cata-MoP range. The fun has been off and on since then, never steady like it was in the original and first 2 xpacs. Today there is enough to do to keep everyone busy in game, but it is dominated by raiding. If you want to raid, you have to start at the very beginning and keep pace. Then do everything else on down time. There is no other way to do it. You can’t say I’ll spend the first nine months of an expansion exploring and looking around and at about 10 mos. I’ll focus on raiding.
If you do that you’ve missed the boat.
It didn’t used to be that way. The game was small enough that you could do end game and still spend a fair bit of time looking around. Because of how much there is and the way people approach it, it is very difficult to stop and smell the roses and be serious about the end game at the same time. One kind of pushes the other off to the side.
The absolute top end of the Mythic+ scene that an extremely tiny portion of the population is in, has people playing particular setups because nothing can be perfectly balanced. They’re maximizing their ability to time those keys.
If you saw the groups on the Classic beta that were doing SM Cathedral at 30, they were in the exact same situation. They had particular group setups so they could actually clear the dungeon.
You’re making an extremely dishonest comparison. If there were dungeons as difficult as a 20+ key in Classic, you’d see the same “balance” issues.
EDIT: You can literally play whatever you want up to a certain level, depending on skill. Before I quit doing Mythic+, we were doing 5-7 keys with 5 paladins, one prot and 4 ret paladins. I’ve also made a somewhat viable ret healing spec that I could definitely heal 10+ keys with.
TLDR; Balance is only an issue in BfA at the top end and the same could be said of Classic. Play what you want in either game unless you care about being the 0.1%
supposedly it was like that in tbc too, in that you had all kinds of preliminary work, keys, faction, attunements, etc. i remember doing the quests and gathering the parts to get into karazhan, pretty long process. had to loot that thing in shadowlabs by the last boss, and jump in the water in steamvault and loot that one, etc. and you needed karazhan to go to next one. and if you were late to the party, somebody had to help you get all that done.
MMO’s have never ever been tabletop RPG’s. And I’m not someone who plays like they are one. I don’t begrudge people who do, but that isn’t what the game is like even on RP servers. Nyl isn’t a persona. There’s no background. There’s no story. Nyl is just the avatar I have access to the beta in dev forums and thus he’s the character I use to post on the forums. Nothing more or less. If I want a single player RPG experience there are plenty of games I can play to get that (or I can actually play a tabletop RPG).
its not a mmo. it’s a mmorpg. ![:sunglasses:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/sunglasses.png?v=6" ":sunglasses:")
An irrelevant distinction that doesn’t actually substantively address anything. Nice job.
Edit: Do you think the average player writes up a background for each character they make? Do they see the game through the lens of the personalized story you tried to tell above about the character Nyl? No, they don’t. And that doesn’t exist any more or less in classic either. So congrats, you just proved that neither Classic nor retail are more or less RPG’s than each other. Thumbs up!
It will take a few months before non-hardcore guilds are doing 40-man raids
you’re welcome. i’m here everday till august 27th!
its actually not irrelevant since one suggests you’re playing a role in a fantastical setting with other people also playing roles in that same fantastical setting, and the other suggests you’re just playing a game with other people. (just so’s ya know, i’m not your enemy. i’m a nice person and dont think any less of you because we have a slight disagreement on semantics. i’m a wow fan, regardless.)