Prediction: The SoD servers will mostly be dead and quiet once MC is out.
It’s a boring raid, it’s tired and we’ve all done it a million times. Adding new class spells and specs won’t make it any less boring. The server populations will crash to the floor. Servers will be condensed into one server and it’ll be small.
Era will have a rebound though. The classic purists will point and laugh and blame “retail” for some reason.
Many of us will cope and fight them back that it “wasn’t that bad” but nobody will listen.
Simply put, the old raids are boring… and any fresh / re-release will die at MC & bwl. It’s been happening for 10+ years on pservers… it’ll happen here too with SoD.
Enjoy the first 4 leveling phases. These will be a blast and the height of SoD. Don’t rush it, enjoy it instead. Level every class you can and have fun! Give them good data for the real classic+ to be a juggernaut of a game!
I could see people overall getting to BWL (assuming MC phase doesn’t last forever). ZG/AQ20 are sleepers for me though, so boring. Although it could be because I just played classic era for 7 months and probably 5 months of that was doing 1-2 zg/aq20 runs a week lol. Hopefully the new runes/comps/ and potentially new gear changes/loot table make all the classic raids more fun for people who have done them multiple times.
But yeah phases 1-4 and pre-bis gearing up will probably be the most fun/lively part of SoD.
We’ll have to see if they do add new endgame instances/raids that help increase player retention for a longer period.
I highly doubt level 60 will just have MC, at least in its current iteration, as a raid considering there is a new raid at 25 and they’ve already teased other new raids.
SoD’s content release phases are likely planned to try to keep people subbed between now and War Within / CataC.
If we hit 60 long before WW releases, I’d guess they already have some level 60 5 mans converted into 10 man raids. If WW releases shortly after SoD allows you to hit 60, I’d guess they’d prefer it be boring past that point.
Thinking that Blizz purposefully sabotages their projects for the sake of their other projects seems like insane, baseless fan theorizing to me. Only after one of their projects fails hard, like WoD or SL, would they put a project on a lower priority while they’re working on their course correcting followup expansion.
SoD seems like a public testing ground for how to handle the making of Classic+ for the large number of people who are asking for it. It seems to be being sold to us under the moniker of a “Season” since they’ve used that the type of wording and branding before with SoM. Blizzcon made it sound like Classic+ is coming after SoD, so this isn’t just a throwaway season, it’s important testing and gauging of the community’s wants and needs.
Even if there’s an SoD part 2 or continuation people call Classic+, it will likely be launched in lulls of WW/CataC content as filler when people get bored of those between content releases. I highly doubt they expect/want a third independent version of WoW to compete with the existing two tracks and split their players even more.
I’m under an impression that it’s really not competition for most players. I had quit WoW completely until Classic launched, they wouldn’t have me as a customer otherwise.
Blizzard made Classic because they saw Nostalrius having 13k players online and wanted that market.
Blizzard is making Classic+ because they see TurtleWoW having 60k players online and want that. A lot of Vanilla/Private server players are purists that hate TurtleWoW, C+ is it’s own third market.
And since TWoW is ~6x more popular than Nostalrius ever was, Blizzard is expecting 6x the market they got from Vanilla.
Last time I looked, DF had 400k+ players. WotLKC had 400k+ players (some of that is overlap of course as some people play multiple versions). Era only has 20kish if population sites are at all accurate.
SoD will be pulling most of its population from DF and WotLKC. Most people trying it are already WoW players playing other versions and Era players will be the minority in SoD at launch. They don’t want or need WotLKC or DF players to permanently migrate into a new WoW track, they want them to be temporary players between launches of new content in the existing tracks.
I don’t think SoD is primarily targeting pserver players at all. Half of those people probably just don’t want to pay a sub and aren’t going to regardless of what Blizzard does. They already pulled in whatever pserver players were willing to pay them for classic.
I 100% agree that this is a testing ground for a classic+, but I do not see classic+ coming soon, if anything most likely between War Within and Midnight expansion or even further out.
But I do agree SoD is going to be the beta test for classic +.
I really really hope that’s true. If it’s just boom here is MC bosses have one more mechanic, no shot. I know lots of people want that and that’s cool, for me that’s a game killer
I highly doubt they expect/want a third independent version of WoW to compete with the existing two tracks and split their players even more.
You’re making a lot of assumptions about how many people are going to continue playing Cata and onwards. I did love MoP, but the population decline after wotlk will only be worse now people actually know what those expacs contain.
This is content testing without the “PTR” aspect and it’s open to all without actually admitting that’s it’s a PTR realm. I feel this is something blizzard is or was wanting to test before they add this type of contact to the upcoming Cataclysm re-release. Again, this content that we’ll be testing was never meant to be added to cataclysm so this will create a new direction for future classic expansions.