Vanilla methods did not work. Layer up to level 30 zones = fun experience w/o the negatives.
Correct. I donât know, and neither does Blizzard, which is why I find it alarming that theyâre saying theyâll turn off layering âin a few weeks when populations die down,â since thereâs a very real chance that wonât happen.
They did, to a point. And layering will put us in a position that they arenât so bad that those methods canât work.
Blizzard is likely going off of a lot of different statistics than you might be⌠You could reasonably look at how many accounts WoW has had made during its time (over 100 million) and it doesnât seem unlikely that you could bring 5-10 million of that number back, certainly a decent percentage of the 6 million that played when vanilla was current.
It isnât gonna like that however. Blizzard is taking into account tourists, the current generation of gamers that will not have the attention span or patience to fight a single murloc, drink/eat after pull, rinse and repeat. The pserver population arent any indication this is going to be a huge success. The 250,000 poll certainly doesnât indicate millions are wanting in on this.
The nice thing is that classic will be there as an option where as just a couple years ago it wasnât even a realistic option cause Blizzard refused to do it. Perhaps the best thing thatll come of this is they will study whats working with vanilla and not working with retail and combine the features to make a better retail WoW while also leaving classic there for the niche that wants classic and classic only. The two can coexist.
I donât see how they think the decrease theyâre expecting will happen evenly over various servers over the predicted time-frame either. Some servers are always more popular than others.
Now, add streamers. Do they think the streamer servers are going to decrease in population by a high percentage over the weeks/months of phase 1? If they open a new realm, even with free transfers, are the streamer fans even going to want to move?
In retail, there is faction imbalance. If that is duplicated in Classic, are those on Horde heavy realms going to want to move to one where they donât have the advantage?
I could go on, but letâs just say there are lots of questions.
Combined realms not cross realm. Very different. Those donât go over very well either.
When predictions are based on statistical analysis it moves away from just a hunch and a lot closer to fact.
Was their statistical analysis showing that people would like all the dumb things they included in BFA?
They canât do statistical analysis to move âcloser to factâ when they have no meaningful data to base anything off of. Without pre-sales or advanced sub fee purchases, theyâre just guessing.
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What you consider dumb may not be dumb for their target audience.
You donât like BfA, so be it, doesnât mean Blizzard didnât do their homework.
Fact is fact even if we are unaware. Statistics is a method of tracking fact. Using that tracking does move decisions closer to fact.
A hunch does not.
Subs have been declining since Wrath. Worse and worse each xpac. So no, theyâre obviously not doing their homework. Theyâre destroying the game because of poor decision making, and now theyâre trying to sneak some of it into Classic via layering.
You canât track the future. Also, your stats are only as good as your models, and theyâre in uncharted waters and have nothing to create a reasonable model for predicting Classic drop off rates. They donât know whatâs going to happen.
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Thatâs true of every MMO platform.
People hold up OSRS as an example of âdone rightâ, yet it struggled to hit 50,000 active users for most of its life. They only boosted their numbers in late 2018 with a better Mobile client and increased mobile usability.
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So much biased opinion in this. Donât even know where to start burning this strawman.
Fact is never future. Thatâs by definition.
However, this is not uncharted water at all. Itâs not even obscure data. The gaming industry has had the hype chasing crown under their thumb for many years. They will follow the next great hype and brag about spending that money all the way.
They have history and the history of pretty much every single online game is a huge spike of concurrent users at launch followed by a significant dropoff. There may be a steady rise in population after, but thatâs much easier to deal with than that initial spike.
Hereâs the thing. If Classic outperforms expectations, layering is most likely still going away. Layering exists to improve the user-end experience, it does nothing to alleviate the server-side problems (except queues).
So if Classic outperforms what Blizz expects, and servers end up being taxed by the user load, Blizz is going to have to add more servers. Which diffuses out the population. Which solves the user-end problems. Which means they can still remove layering.
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Vanilla, BC, and Wrath had no such drop offs.
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I would bet cash money they did. Youâre confusing the overall growth of the game with the spike of concurrent players at launch.
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Thatâs a bit of a fallacy there. The sub count didnât drop off, but thereâs no way of knowing if thatâs because nobody quit after hitting the cap, or if enough new players were rolling at level 1 to offset it and then some.
Layering, good in concept, but right now its so buggy!
I know this has been posted to death, but Iâm really hoping it gets fixed to how they meant it to work.
So growth automatically means less concurrent users for no other reason than itâs not launch? lololol.
Concurrent Users != Capped Users