I’m probably misinformed as I haven’t played WoW seriously for a long time, but I’m wondering how Blizzard is planning on dealing with the playerbase being split up in so many ways.
Currently we have Retail, WoW Classic, WoW Classic HC, WOTLK Classic, SoD and as far as I’m aware, none of these share servers, so considering Retail is basically an empty void right now and only seems to somewhat come alive in new patches or especially expansion releases, it seems like most people pummeled Classic HC until War Within.
Obviously, SoD is going to be popular for awhile but if WoW’s track record says anything, not one thing is going to remain populated forever. I hope I’m wrong, but SoD seems like it’s going to be a temporary thing after all the levels are released because IMO, it’s hard to take it seriously (it’s not meant to be) so I can’t imagine everyone is going to put all their effort into this as opposed to other servers.
It’s nice to see Blizz try new things, I just don’t know how long this can be sustainable and maybe it doesn’t matter. Personally, I’m behind the curve massively on the Classic side of things and I’d like to play through Classic > TBC > WOTLK and Cata when it comes out, however, WOTLK Classic overrides all those and I can no longer go back and experience it anymore since I wasn’t there at that time, Cata will only compound that issue.
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I see these as separate games for different type of players.
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SoD is gonna be a seasonal thing. So it will be popular for a month then die out and then like 5 months later they will launch another season and it will repeat.
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They’re not. They make money either way and the impact isn’t as great as you imply.
Retail isn’t an empty void. It does however have far to many servers. They should continue combining them or start retiring them.
You realize Classic HC only has 2 servers, right? Of course it seems full.
In contrast, Season of Discovery has 8 servers, Regular Classic has 40, and Wraith has 23.
And for even more contrast, retail has 240 servers.
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This.
The premise that these variants split the playerbase up presumes that if there was only one variant everybody would stay subbed and the population for the one variant would be higher than any of the current “split” variants.
It’s more likely that if you closed Classic you’d simply lose those players (and their sub revenue) that only play Classic and have no interest in Retail. Blizzard would also have to consider if they wanted to deal with an increase in private servers and sue/not-sue over IP infringement.
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As long as they get their subscription fees, I don’t think they if there is only one player on a realm. Especially since all the realms are virtual machines these days. If it isn’t getting used, they can just spin it down until needed.
Connecting them, yes. But there’s no need to screw over people with deleting servers. That just creates a mass exodus.
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I could be wrong, but at least to me, it seems that connecting servers has not been effective in actually fixing server populations. Those realms still seem empty and there is still an ongoing migration to “mega servers” as players look for more players to play/interact with.
Retail is already split up into warmode on and off. Then when you level it is also split up by chromie time, so 4 different shards. It’s amazing if you see even a single leveler out in the world on many realms.
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Really wish people would stop saying this.
I literally never see Valdrakken empty.
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Other people have said want I wanted to say about the different game play types but Blizzard really needs to think about closing and/ or merging servers. And even how sharding works, many MMOs have systems were people can move around shards at will by picking a “channel” to be on. Something like this can make the world feel more full but all allow for people that like a low pop realm to be happy as well.
Im good with it. Its always best to avoid the toxic retail types.
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That’s because they haven’t done much of it. They put together only a small handful of realms that were like-minded communities. They didn’t want to change that paradigm for those servers.
I know there were issues with it the last time and they believe that opening up more cross realm stuff should fix it, so they have no plans to do anything else with servers.
I’ve also seen lots of people transferring to servers like mine, as well— off of the high pop realms.
It’s all player choice.
Which is good.
I can see that, but when classic came out, about 1/3 of our guild disappeared forever 
I actually wondered about the dilution of the player base out of retail. But I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.
You forgot to add factions. Wow players are also divided by race in this game. It is what it is. 
It’s not spitting, it’s rather keeping players attention between different flavours. Getting tired of retail and checking out classic while paying the sub fee benefits Blizzard. It’s not like players who play classic now would have played retail with as much vigor.
Plus some players never play retail in the first place.
At least 4 years, we know that much
The only realms where Retail is still going strong are RP realms. We pretty much keep Retail alive in content droughts because we’re big nerds and make our own content.
