I'm seeing history repeat itself, with TBC nay-sayers

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
21

TBC did have great sub growth, it was second best however to Vanilla.

In reality the best time that Blizzard ever had was Vanilla and TBC, everything that followed has actually been a massive downgrade in terms of growth. Wrath was just maintaining the status quo even though some will point out peak numbers that are almost meaningless.

The growth numbers speak for them selves, vanilla wow peaked at 8 Million subs, that is just bonkers insane for an mmorpg.

TBC added 3.5 million subs, and retained them.

Wrath added 500 thousand subs, and struggled to retain them.

Cata, MoP, WoD, Legion, and had nice little bumps in numbers, but failed to retain them.

Classic is a very different animal from Vanilla, its got 99% similarity, but the nuance in difference are indeed hurting it and have turned a lot of people away.

  1. Cross server PVP is a mistake.
  2. Mega server populations is a misake.
  3. End game gear stats, talents and spells are a mistake without world, dungeon and raid tuning.
  4. open transfers are a mistake.
  5. failing to more strongly police cheating and hacking is a mistake.

Some will point out that we know everything and cheaters have become more sophisticated, and those things are true, but its also true that cheating can be policed even if its tough to do, and the “system” can be enhanced to better derail cheating. Its also possible to tweak, dungeon, raid and world npc numbers, values and mechanics in a way that gives us a more “Vanilla” like experience, because overall the numbers do not matter, what matters is the experience, that is what people were after and it was very foolish to take numeric values literally when everything is far out of range due to the changes made by being out of step with nearly everything character, gear and ability related.

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22

I don’t agree with everything your saying, but both TBC and WOTLK will carry more subs than classic currently has. It will actually draw a significant amount of new players into the game who weren’t there the first time. Both TBC and WOTLK have a chance to carry more concurrent subscribers than the originals.

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23

I think they have a great opportunity to make changes based on how classic went to make BC better than it ever was before. Imagine if they gave us the pvp glory of TBC but with new challenging and fun modern raid mechnics.

24

Blizzard has proven they don’t know how to properly manage their game, with all the non vanilla behavior in classic.

I don’t think they deserve a chance to ruin TBC.

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25

The nay-sayers were kinda right…Classic came out in Aug 2019 and people are already bored. World of Warcraft Vanilla came out Nov 2004 and Burning Crusade came out Jan 2007, that’s over three years that people played Vanilla. Whereas classic players have played just over one.

Just saying…

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26

Yeah they were right when they said classic would be flooded with vacationing retail players. They literally had to add like 20-30 extra servers due to the hype.

27

TBC must crush all classic servers with an iron shod boot.

In fact i say make all servers on the day of launch automatically convert to BC, no ‘museums’ no separate servers nothing. All of classic must be burned in the fire to cleanse the game.

28

I disagree with that. I don’t want that, thank you.

29

It was satire.

Personally i think there should be a ‘museum’ server .

But i seriously doubt it will have any longevity. You can only do the same raid content for so long before people move onto a new game. I mean who is going to care if youve cleared Naxx 100 times ? Very few i imagine.

The way i see it “Classic” has a few years, it reliving Wow’s glory days until ‘Wotlk’ comes and goes. Cataclysm was the first expansion that set Blizzard on its current path of simply making the game worse with every expansion. Blizzard in the intervening period from Wrath to Cataclysm became arrogant and it showed.

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I mean life is arbitraty i don’t care what achievements you have made in any video game its a video game lol. They will string out tbc and wotlk for 4-5 years but the real trick will be making sure there is downtime in between to bring people back to retail.

31

I’d like to point out that I’m not playing Classic for the Raid Content. I, thoroughly, enjoy leveling characters, as slowly as possible. One Quest at a time, tackling professions, speccing differently and RPing. I’ve always played the old content, over and over, again. Even in Retail, before they decided to add level scaling and change the way leveling works, in general.

The content that was important, to me, finally got changed into something that wasn’t enjoyable, for me. With that being said, I think having multiple “Museum” type Servers would be helpful for Raid Loggers. If all they’re doing is Raid Logging, they could “Raid Log” multiple times, per each “Museum” Server type. Log in Classic, Raid, switch over to BC, Raid, switch over to Wrath, Raid, etc. They’ll have multiple days booked, just for Raiding, on different “Museum” Server types.

I think the end game would flourish a bit more, on all the Servers, personally.

Personally, I don’t really care if anybody steps foot into it, TBH. That’s not the point, though.

I think you’re missing the point in why people would even play old games, to begin with. I still play other old games that isn’t Classic WoW because I have fun playing those games. I can try to see if I can beat my old record or complete them, from a different angle/difficulty. Nobody really cares how many times I’ve played Banjo-Kazooie/Banjo-Tooie, but their opinion of it is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is if I’m (or anyone else) having fun with it.

I agree with you here (with the exception, I feel like it happened in Wrath but was tolerable). Cata really was the turning point of a downward spiral.

32

As long as classic remains untouched it doesnt matter what happens in other expansions.

33

I agree :100:. It blows my mind seeing people suggest changes that just lead to retail. Its in blizzards interest to keep it different otherwise it’s pointless to have two separate wows

34

Most people replay old games but it seems you’re a little different than most. Eventually most people are done with the old game forever. I loved Morrowind. I played it through on several different races and classes then put it away. Several years later I was bored so I played it again, but only on my favorite class. That was at least 12 years ago. I still have the disc and could replay it. But I doubt I will ever again. I did the same with Diablo 2, and Baulder’s Gate, etc. I’m done with them.

Now I’m doing it with classic wow. I’ll replay BC and Wrath. But after that if there’s a fresh classic server I won’t play it again. Vanilla wow, and BC and Wrath were good games worth replaying but not an unlimited number of times.

2 Likes
35

You can also look beyond to see the impact a previous expansion has on a playerbase to some degree. Wrath got even more subs in part because people were coming off the backs of BC. If TBC was WoD, and Wrath was BFA then I dont think most people would stick around to even see Arthas.

It was simply superior design. There was no massive falloff after initial release. That only became the norm going into Cata and especially MoP and WoD if looking at sub numbers before they removed that data from us.

Games design is wack now. I tried playing Retail prepatch for the last 5 days, tried all my favorite classes to max level and they all feel bad. Nothing like what they should be. Overly busy, convoluted, linear rotations with RNG on top of RNG on top of RNG rotations and itemization that means nothing beyond ILVL. Zero fulfillment getting any drop, zero fulfillment playing my Class, zero fulfillment beating content.

Just trash unfortunately. I really wanted to like it too because World Buff meta burned me out on Vanilla. I just want TBC at this point :frowning:

36

Is this implying if every expansion that followed TBC was as “good” that we would still be climbing in subs after 16 years?

Maybe 70 million subs right now?

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37

I don’t quite disagree with you, here. I believe Classic will still have people (maybe not as large) of people simply wanting to “replay” it.

IDK about “forever”. I definitely agree players will reach a stopping point and shelf games for awhile before coming back to it, after awhile. It’s already been happening with Classic. Got friends who play Classic for a bit, shelf it and come back into it.

38

The “nay sayers” kept proclaiming that Classic would be dead in a month.

It is now 14 months later and it’s still not dead.

Just because you’re bored doesn’t mean everyone else is. “Just saying”.

Vanilla private servers have been a thing for nearly 15 years now. Old people go, new people come. I’m not sure how you can say “oh it will be gone in a few years” after 15 years of private servers, which are the reason why Classic exists in the first place.