I don’t believe so. I think Blizzard’s intention with SOM is to maintain player retention in their ecosystem to prevent us from exploring other options outside of WoW. As many have pointed out TBCC is massively a raid logging expansion. So currently I have a ton of time to explore other options which may cut at my interest in playing WoW more.
I assume SOM is the main way to help ensure the players stay within WoW by giving them more classic content to do while they raid log in TBCC servers (or convert entirely which is also acceptable). It’s cheap, quick implementation with no clear goal for how the seasons actually play out reinforces this notion that they are worried about players exploring their competitors and perhaps not returning because they are rushing it out asap to align with Endwalker. I STILL don’t know what happens at the end of 12 months lol.
TBC and ERA servers are not dead in the sense of end-game guilds, but are completely dead as to leveling. SoM will be an interesting attempt to market just to a band of players running together up to end-game. Then, I suspect, Bliz expects those servers to die too, and do a new season.
This suggests TWO possible new approaches Bliz might consider:
For TBC and ERA: just assist anyone get to end-game who wants to avoid leveling solo in empty zones. Just let those end-game players start new toons at lvl 50 with stock gearing, for example. End of problem (except probably have to artificially fix AH).
For NEW PLAYERS TO WoW: Bliz needs to do something entirely different than what they have tried. They need to find a way to make leveling THE GAME, and those that reach end-game, maybe just let them transfer out to one of the other approaches. This may sound very strange, but Bliz does zero marketing for new players who have no knowledge of end-game raiding and don’t need that knowledge for a year or more, or at least not for a few months. SO capitalize on THAT by making leveling actually the POINT for all new players to experience as they go. Maybe make those servers FREE? or very heavily discounted, and if discounted, then charge a bit to transfer to end-game servers.
Does this answer the OP’s point? I think so, because at base the question is always the same: why isn’t the game made more interesting somehow to counter-act the constant trend to servers dying.
Most likely they are trying to satisfy a bunch of different people saying different things: try fresh, gib classic plus, rush wrath. If they do this right adding classic som 12 season cycles, state that after 12m they will be moved to a pre-plus server with som raids, and more raids to come (eventually) with naxx being the end goal and new raids which are not quite as hard as naxx, but will help people clear naxx, that should give some time to those who want to have longer pvp seasons, and allow transfers off dying servers, p3 tbc drastically increase honor gains when s1 items are buyable with honor, go through remaining phases, do what they can to encourage pvp (aka turn it into a way to cheese for easy items for those who want to and readd premades with rated bgs with rewards to match), then release wrath and take the expansion real slow since many ppl think wrath is peak wow. As for classic vanilla, there are 3-4 raiding guilds on ashkandi/pagle/etc, not ashkandi tbc.
This is part of it. Classic TBC was always going to be a lot grindier than Classic Vanilla was. It was always going to be more finely tuned than Classic Vanilla was since you only had 25 people. Add on the warcraft logs, and the people who are really low performers are exposed.
At the end of the SOM is going to punish those who don’t want to put in the work.
As good as some of the WotlK raids were there is too much overhyping. There was way too much time afking in Dal to call that a great xpac outside of Ulduar and ICC.
PvP wise it was fun if you flavoured DK Paladin or TSG/LSDruid toward the end of the xpac.
With how undertuned Naxx was the first phase is going to be a snorefest.
How does it feel on ur tbc server? cuz mine was extremely busy months leading to tbcc launch and now. It’s like a ghost town, I go out to STV, HFP/Nagrand/Zanga/NS and I have yet to see an alliance out and about. I mean, come to think about it I hardly even see horde out and about.
I think part of the problem is everyone knows what to do and rush to get it down and just raid log’s from there on end. Back in vanilla days, it was all new and people actually enjoyed going out in the world and starting stuff. I still have great memories of defending stonetalon mountains, xroads and the battles at 3 corners. These new players just want their items ASAP… play for fun, no freaking way.
I play on a mega server so things are fine. But you can feel the game dying for sure. And yeah, most people just raid log. We run 2 raid groups but even on a regular non raiding night we have … 10 people on? 12? Granted, a lot of us on discord and not in game, but still.