The lack of communication on anything regarding Classic ERA, SOM2 or WOTLK is just pathetic at this point. All Blizzard cares about is their retail wow and diablo subs/cash shops. You have an entire playerbase that is dedicated to classic/vanilla wow, players that are still paying their subs regardless of your incompetence. Players that have been dedicated to your company for over 15 years and this is how you treat everyone.
The potential for Classic+ is absolutely massive, I just can’t believe how far down the drain this company has gone, it honestly makes me sad.
As soon as they announce what “Classic +” means it will flop. Clearly there is no consensus on what the game OUGHT to be. Classic Era, SoM, and WRATH are all very different and appeal to different, not always intersecting groups.
“Classic +” is shorthand for more RAID content than anything else. The first time around, way back when, most people weren’t raiders. Most people NEVER saw the inside of AQ or even MC much less Naxx. Now we have people who want the Raids to be harder, so they aren’t bored with doing them over and over again.
If you’re bored with the raids, you should move on to another game. Not try to change the game so it better fits your play style.
Vanilla has been emulated over and over again on private servers and now on Blizzard realms. It shouldn’t change now because the attention span of the playbase has dwindled.
I am not bored with raids, I have never been a raider. The only Raid I have been in (other than AV) is the old school epic TM Vs. SS world PvP raids. I don’t even do dungeons, YET I still have a great many hours into the game. I do MY thing and I have a great deal of fun doing it. The persistent world is the CORE of any MMORPG experience not grinding through the same instance over and over again.
To be honest, if RAIDs are what you want, why NOT play Retail? Isn’t that the strongest part of the current iteration of the game now?
My worst fear now is they shut the ERA servers off when Microsoft takes over. The “Numbers” for Classic era can’t be that good, though they have improved over the last three months. There have been days when there are less than a handful of people playing on both of the East Coast PvP server clusters combined. How much does it cost to furnish, power and maintain a server cluster?
Once Microsoft takes over, I am sure they will announce something soon after.
It doesnt matter they are not separate servers. This is all run off of cloud tech. Your entire classic era could be off the back of candy crush realms for all we know.
This is the point im making. I dont think costs basically anything really.
Knowing what Activision is and what it isn’t… WoW Classic is all I ask. Simply let us enjoy it, with the occasional fresh server. I don’t need new content, but I do want a clean slate after it runs its course.
Honestly blizzard’s pipeline after D4 looks abysmal. I’m guessing an SoM2 possibly being tied to hardcore is likely in the fall this year. It looks like they’re content having people who want traditional classic just play era instead of the FRESH that we hope for.
A classic+ just isn’t happening either imo to the changes-extent that some people are hoping for, but hey maybe they’ll surprise us.
They’re about to announce something between now and patch 10.1 on retail, most likely next season of xxx and hardcore server support for classic era (datamined). The 10.1 is the biggest content patch for retail and after that their next cycle will be classic (era and wotlk).
Is it abandonware then?
How serious is M$ about protecting IP rights?
Era is fine. You’re specifically talking about the possibility of a fresh/reboot of the original game, correct?
As others have stated, seasonal announcement will probably be taking a backseat at the moment so they can focus on D4 then retail Wow. If you believe “leaks” then Q4 of 2023 is the likely drop date for the next seasonal.
I get it. I feel it would be better to get information and updates more frequently.
But that’s been a beef for a very, very long time.
Maybe the fact that people are continuing to pay subscriptions tells them that many are okay with the communication situation. The players using the forum are a miniscule amount when compared with the entire player base. Maybe those of us here are just the gadflies.
It’s honestly a joke. Aggrend could literally enter any random discord and say, “we are/aren’t working on som and will have news at some stage”, it would take him literally 10 seconds and appease the community. But they aren’t willing to give us 10 seconds of their time. So maybe they haven’t made their mind up, or, as the OP stated, they just couldn’t care less.
I think the question isn’t if he can or can’t but if he should. I’ll quote the messages he posted on the Classic Era discord below for clarity.
Aggrend:
i’ll preface this by saying, this is a generalized statement about why sometimes announcements or info on future releases comes what you might think of as “late”
the problem with communicating super early is that in the development process, a lot of things change. communicating half baked ideas or things that are likely to change is pretty likely to set incorrect expectations for what is coming. Additionally, there’s risk when doing any kind of feature or game development. Things may not go according to plan, or may end up taking longer than even your best estimates. When that happens, it sets players and the devs up for dissapointment.
I think a good example of this I can give is the announcement I made around being able to move your characters from SoM to wrath. We wanted to let people know well ahead of time that was coming so they could plan, but it ended up taking us a while to develop the tech for (its actually really complex and unprecendented to allow you to move between “regions” which is effectively what Era/SoM and Wrath were; separate regions) and it didn’t come with wrath pre-patch. I think if I had that to do over again, I’d have wanted to be a bit more sure about when exactly that would have been ready before announcing it, or at least having been more clear that it might not be ready by wrath ship.
Eh, I don’t really agree with that if he simply said something like, we are in the very early stages of planning a new season and have no release date currently, or at the current time we are not planning a fresh realm. Just a nod in either direction that either let’s people know whether or not the game is actually coming or not. It’s not setting the playerbase us for disappointment, it’s a minor communication to the playerbase so they can determine what they want to do.
I’m sure there are a lot of players who might be hesitant to play on era with the feeling that a new realm might be on the horizon, but it they were told whether simply a server was coming or not they can make a decision.