And according to every extrapolation of Blizzard’s information, subs spike at each new expansion then rapidly drop off again after they find out it wasn’t the “WoW resurrection” they expected.
Your idea that people don’t stop no matter what happens doesn’t hold up in the face of declining subs.
see the problem is that wrath basically is retail. maybe not so far gone but most the systems are in place
Tank and Spank dungeons
Multiple Raid Difficulties
Everyone has everything (aoe, heals, CC, Utility, Roughly Equal DPS)
Catch Up Mechanics
what do classic fans get from that?
the fact that it’s not as terrible as retail? big woop.
It’s still a big if, the game’s not out, we don’t know it will be simply because we all troll around these forums and say it will.
Would be nice though. I like new content I just don’t like retail’s mechanics and focus on endgame rather than community and leveling as part of the game.
I mean, this is EXACTLY what retail players are afraid of. It’s the driving factor for their hatred for Classic existing. If Classic is popular they are super worried it will end up with more classic ideals being brought back.
I was only referring to those that are still playing today… who manage to find some reason to play despite how much they’ve changed the game to be non-social, queue based, and RNG laden.
This was my take on Wrath too. It started with communities, and when LFD came out, what soon followed was GearScore, breakdown of Guilds into 10 man raiding, Cataclysm’s lackluster performance with reduced community, and then complete community collapse followed with CRZs in MoP.
Different people find different reasons to play. And for some, the $15 sub really isn’t much. Just like people pay for Netflix, HBO, Hulu, CBS All Access, Amazon Prime Video, and a bunch of other services, and barely watch any of the content on any given platform.
But the subs are still falling away, if all the reports are to be believed. Classic was the only thing that stopped me killing mine after the BfA launch proved they were still going in the wrong direction.
Retails players care more about cosmetics and having their class/spec being relevant in any given situation.
It’s sad to say, but I will probably never play the latest extension of WoW again. The mentality is completely at the opposite of what I want to play in a MMORPG
And maybe that is what Blizz is aiming for… a WoW for people like you and I… and a WoW for those that like what it has become in Modern WoW.
I would just love to had been able to experience the storyline with the game I enjoyed playing instead of watching the game unfold via youtube videos of the cutscenes. ![:frowning:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/frowning.png?v=6" ":frowning:")
I also think wotlk was the “start of the end” but at the same time I think wotlk was a great expansion.
The thing with wotlk imo is that it stroked a great balance between being a more “modern” version of the game and what classic was. There was a certain balance.
Current retail has no balance, after cata it just completely went into the “new direction” and completely discarded classic elements.
The question raised wasn’t how retail can change to make classic players happy but rather how can classic influence future development of RETAIL. Subsequent conversation, which is the post I was responding to, discussed how classic changes would be unpalatable to RETAIL players. My response was a suggestion that change back in the direction of classic might be palatable to RETAIL players if you took baby steps and you considered a middle ground like WotLK.
You can argue wrath is not close enough to vanilla for classic players all you want but my entire discussion is based off the idea that classic already exists, has been proven popular and Blizzard now wants to use its success to influence future development of RETAIL in a way that keeps their RETAIL base happy but still offers a step or two back in the direction of their original roots.
That being said. Wrath offers retailers elements that they have come to require while still offering many elements of classic wow as such, it might be a good middle ground to attempt to return more of the classic elements to RETAIL while still keeping RETAIL players happy.
If I was talking about tailoring a game for CLASSIC players, I would not be suggesting anything other than Vanilla.
Or is your contention now that WoW must give us a classic version of the game as well as return RETAIL to version that appeals to classic only people as well? I really don’t get what your arguing about or why my suggestion for RETAIL is such an issue for you. Like I said before, if you don’t like my suggestion, offer your own that will appeal to RETAIL players instead of repeating your opinion of why its not good for classic players over and over again.
Either bring something new to the discussion or step way from the keyboard already.
it didn’t strike balance at all.
dungeons got nerfed to nothingness
raids were a joke outside of ulduar
classes were homogenized
LFD…
the best thing about the entire expansion was Ulduar and the Story.
and my point is that while Wrath might be palatable to retail players, it’s unpalatable for classic fans.
so would that make retail a better game then it currently is? yeah. but that’s because retail is a dumpster fire.
but would it bring me back to the game? not even close.
what are these elements it offers classic fans?
class diversity? oh wait no. they got homogenized.
world exploration? oh wait no, LFD.
decent challenge? not even close. raids and dungeons were a joke.
so yes. Wrath would appeal to modern fans.
but it wouldn’t appeal to true classic fans.
We all love classic, the majority who post on this forum.
What remains to be seen is if that number competes with “live”.
I think there is a chance that it might, because the investment and social side of the game is what really hooked people in the first place.
How long has it been since people called WoW “World of Warcrack”. I haven’t felt that way almost 10 years.
There are still some MMO players out there, question is how many.
Also, a lot of players don’t pay money for their sub anymore. They’re subsidized by whales who purchase large amounts of tokens.
For someone who still has a sub, it might be worth 100k gold/month to keep playing, but not 15 dollars. For someone else, it might be worth 20 dollars to buy 100k gold. The split between most players and whales is inevitable as a result of current real-world circumstances which are off-topic, but the relevant point is that whales exist and are here to stay.
I disagree.
Dungeons were not easy at release, they were easy once you got a bunch of raid gear. Just like what happened in classic and tbc.
And TBC and Classic raids were so much harder? Lol… classic and tbc raids weren’t harder than wotlk whatsoever. They were hard in the context of “you need res gear, you need 40 people (in vanilla) and you need to gear certain people (8tanks for nax) to pass a certain boss, and a bunch of consumables”. Wotlk raids is when blizzard truly started to grasp the concept of boss mechanics.
As for homogenization. As someone who played all of the healers in wotlk (hpally, rdruid, rshammy,priest) I did not think any of the specs were like each other at all. They all had specific strengths and weaknesses. Talent trees were more cookie cutter than tbc and vanilla and all the specs were viable but the playstyle of all the healers was completely different. In comparison today all the healers are basically the same – what the healers are today is the true homogenization, what healers were in wotlk was not.
And wotlk may have had LFD but at least it didnt have LFR.
That’s why I view it as a balance. But to each their own.
The portals change was made only to increase /played time. It had nothing to do with making the game more fun, and was just a cynical business decision, as so many of the decisions around Modern WoW are these days.
That is why the decision to remove portals upsets people.
Looking at how they handled flight in WoD, Legion and now BFA it’s very clear they only add flight in after the expansion is on its last legs and the only people left playing are those who would never leave the game regardless of how horrible it gets.
At least that’s what it looks like from the outside.
Legion and BfA seems more like they’ve just settled for doing it that way, since they didn’t need to do a bunch of work to “prepare” the world for flying like they did with WoD.
It seems like they wanted to remove it in WoD and there was such a backlash that it scared them off trying so they’ve just settled for delaying it until later in the expansion.
Is flying really that important too you? I ask only because I am genuinely curious. I ask because I don’t actually care about flying. I did not even bother to get it for Cata, MoP, WoD when I was leveling up for Legion. Heck I did not even get it when it came out in Legion, it just felt like it really did not matter at all.
Is flying that important that the game should be built to support a mechanism that essentially allows the player to skip even more content?