The audiences for classic and retail, though they have some overlap, are ultimately different. Classic is fun, and for people like me it’ll have some nostalgia to it, but the novelty will wear off quickly for many people, particularly those who joined after classic. There’s just too much quality of life change in the game over the years.
Classic is just not a game that includes all of the things people expect now. The play is slower. The expectations are different. The pace is slower. The amenities in the engine are far fewer. The quest variety is far lower (Classic is virtually ALL kill/gather/travel quests). The reliance on grouping in-game without a group finder will scare many people off.
People will be interested for a while, then they’ll get tired of having to wait to tag mobs, or they’ll get tired of running everywhere, or they’ll get frustrated because they need to save up gold for a few weeks to buy a mount… and it’ll be a slow mount. Or if they make it to end-game, all those off-specs who didn’t get love in classic will realize that the old prejudices still exist, and that they won’t be treated to the “bring the player, not the class” philosophy they’ve been used to since like 2008. Or they’ll give up after spamming trade for 2 hours looking for a Scholo group so they can get their next marginal upgrade so they can go to MC.
Classic is fine for what it is, but after playing classic for 4 hours last night, I logged back onto retail and everything was just fine. Queues popped normally. Groups for mythics were running. People were killing mobs in questing areas. The world spun as normal, and I suspect that after a month or two people will wonder why anyone thought classic could kill retail at all.
Let’s face it, our love of classic has more to do with nostalgia and the people we played it with and having something that isn’t just a big amusement park to play in… but there’s a reason why more people go to amusement parks than LARP, and that will become evident to people once the novelty wears off.
i personally feel like it is dead; reality it isn’t dead but to me i personally don’t enjoy playing retail anymore nothing about it feels fun. i enjoy the storyline but everything else just feels like diarrhea. constantly being pushed out but nothing is SOLID; meaning content just keeps coming out but quality is heavily lacking.
thats just how i feel everyone has their own opinions. retail still has a pretty thriving population so NO it is NOT dead. even with classic out as well i can almost bet unless blizzard is losing subs from retail they likely are not looking to update classic in the future they may just use it for nostalgia. it’s not like OSRS for example which gets updates constantly still and is voted on by the players if i am correct. with WoW i think they will want to force you to play Retail still for the storyline for those who are still interested and milk the profits thus keeping classic where it is at now.
I haven’t experienced any toxicity yet. Granted I only played for 2 hours yesterday, but those 2 hours were amazing, spent playing the game AND conversing with people. It was great.
People were actually helpful. Without bragging about it in chat. Amazing.
How are you breathing? Do what I said and you will see the solid numbers jesus christ. You people think you’re smarter than people who make billions of dollars doing this stuff?
I definitely played classic all the way through till BfA. I will be going classic 100% and hoping for changes to retail that improves classes. The prune was too much imo. Classic has more spells which is sad.
The source (which people aren’t explaining for the most part, for an obvious reason) is a now debunked WeakAuras post from 2018 that used a beta API to track subscriber end dates and used that data to come to the conclusion that only 1.7m subscribers were active in mid-2018, not counting China.
The problem is that this was data that was not supposed to be exposed and we have no way of knowing if it was real or not. WeakAuras eventually backed down and pulled the claim.
We don’t know what that data means, whether it was reliably updated, or whether Blizzard was using it for anything. You commonly find undocumented data exposed in APIs and if the API isn’t designed to collect that data for normal use, you have no idea what subset you’re getting.
Maybe it was real, maybe it wasn’t… who knows? (Only Blizzard, really)
But what I can say for certain is that the assumption that every person on twitch was in that list when the game at its height had over 10m subscribers and non-concurrent players probably number several magnitudes higher than that is a poor assumption.
This has been talked about in like 20 posts. You’re not adding anything new to the discussion. That is not the only source of estimated subscriber numbers.
