+1 GO PLAY THE EXPANSION CONTENT ON RETAIL #Nochanges #Classic+Only
I’m going to disagree and point to the Private Servers as the example. Private server players flock to Vanilla. TBC and Wrath are minuscule by comparison. Would a “Classic TBC” cause players to leave Classic in favor of TBC? Yes.
But most will likely be back, and many probably won’t leave completely. Also based on the private server experiences, it is very likely that a substantial portion of players will remain within Classic and not bother moving on to TBC.
Yes, it would be disruptive to those communities when that “parting of ways” happens, but I highly doubt it would kill Classic, or those communities. They’d consolidate, reform, adapt, and overcome.
I think you’ll find even many of the “Casual” players end up moving faster than the curve that existed in Vanilla. The 1.12 patch level, and past experience with the game is a huge boost to getting things done more quickly.
By Vanilla standards, most of the Classic players will be power gamers, even the casuals. The problem Classic has is they’ll still have a “power gamer tier” riding on top of that. Which is simply going to be absolutely insane.
The stable servers are also a big deal. For those who raided on high population servers in particular during Vanilla, the LAG encounter brought on by server instability cannot be overstated. Lag caused nearly as many raid wipes for “prime time raiders” as just about anything else in the game. Throw in the potatos that were being used for gaming rigs at the time, and it added even more to the challenge.
Those obstacles will hopefully not be nearly so prevalent in 2019/2020. So “average player” is going to move through content a lot more quickly than in Vanilla. Blizzard’s phase schedule will adjust to reflect that.
What if they opened new servers that only went down the classic+ route?
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I disagree with your sentiment on most of us being power gamers, but you seem to be changing the definition of what a power gamer is to suit your argument. People that were here for the original release have aged. Polls show that a huge number of Classic players are over 30. They will have jobs and families. Those will take priority over power gaming.
It will be interesting to revisit this in a month or two. The number of people that will have cleared MC will be higher, but its not going to be some drastic spike like a “few” are predicting.
It becomes a question of scale. And at least when I’m speaking of a theoretical Classic+ (hi Janorie!) it presumes a graphics update, among a number of other things. It’s Classic gameplay with “modern elements” added on top of it as part of the +.
The scale question is going to get part of its question answered in the next 2 to 3 months. Or more particularly, what, if any, kind of drop off they see in player population after the initial “launch rush” clears itself from the system. If they’re looking at a half-million+ players, don’t be surprised if something like Classic+ gets a quiet green light.
TBC, because “most of the work has been done with Classic” is an easy one for them to openly talk about doing, because the development cost on it is positively trivial, even compared to Classic itself. Just based on the metrics they already have, they’ve already established that they’d be very likely to at least break even on a Classic TBC project.
Classic+ takes things to entirely different level, and is almost, but not quite, another MMO in its own right. That’s some serious money involved there, that one is going to have a larger bar to jump over. But I think Classic is going to make the case for Classic+ over the next year.
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Anything Classic+ at this stage is entirely speculation. So that it “sounds like tin-foil hat stuff” isn’t shocking.
Classic TBC is pretty much a given.
As to inventing new tech that hasn’t even been mentioned?
- Classic runs on a very different rule set than Retail.
- Classic and retail share the same code base.
Those are well known and established facts.
- Currently, they have to run on different clients with different data files for their respective end-use.
This is also a well known and established fact.
- “Good programming practices” would say that the “differing rule sets” are handled in a combination of:
4.a) At compile.
4.b) Through data files.
Which would justify their having unique installs, so it can be safely considered fact even though Blizzard hasn’t spelled it out.
From a maintainability standpoint you want to bring the two “forks” together to the maximum extent possible, to render “the differences” as data only so you no longer need to maintain two different compiles.
This becomes even more critical for them in terms of code management if they’re looking at a Classic TBC(3 compiles), Classic Wrath(4 compiles), and whatever else. 1 compile with multiple divergent but uniform data sets is easier to manage than 3 or 4 different compiles running off of the same base code.
This is good code management practice, that while it may cost more upfront, will cost you less in the long term. So it isn’t much of a “tin foil hat” theory.
So now, if you’ve now removed all of the differences between the various compiles. It just becomes a matter of handling the data.
Which is where things become very tricky, very fast as you’re no longer at a “on load time” event, but a dynamic event which can change at anytime.
Handling that in a way that is secure and not capable of being easily exploited by say, people altering data files or memory, becomes the challenge but they also have Warden for stuff like that.
Which isn’t to mention the concerns about “fragmenting the user base” which suddenly has potential to become a lot less of a concern if say, everybody is running the exact same client and changing between “modes” of play is a fairly simple and straightforward process. Rather than needing to log out of one game, exit the client, load up another client and log back in again.
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And with the wonders of battle.net integration and communities, you could be playing around in Wrath and someone from your guild in Classic could contact you to see if you’re interested in doing _____. At which point you can decide if you want to continue with what you’re doing in Wrath, or go join them on Classic. Amazing, right?
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I said something similar to this in either this thread or the TBC on the table thread…can’t remember which lol
Not to mention the fact that from what I’ve gathered from the Blizzcon launch event and the various interviews lately I don’t think “Classic+” is even something they are thinking about.
Nope. People actually asked the devs if they’d be open to adding new content for Classic such as newer gear/raids/storyline etc. and their answer was a possible Classic TBC release. Hence our discussion in the other thread here:
Already saw that, which is why I said they weren’t really thinking about “Classic+”
TBC is an easy animal to tame. Also, how does ANYONE decide what SHOULD and what SHOULDN’T go into a “+” server? That is such a mixed bag, I think it would do more harm than good to even attempt to sort that out.
Fully half of them are likely to be duplicates/triplicates(or more) of the same person. I have four accounts myself. My OG account, my PVP server cross-faction account, my “guild bank account” and then the RAF account I created to get the mount back in the day. 
Throw in the multiboxers, and then the gold sellers/farmers, and you can probably easily drop that number into the 30 to 40 million people range, possibly as low as the 20 to 30 million range. Although I think 30 million is on the low end.
Your point stands that peak subscription numbers were just shy of 13 Million, and that there were a LOT of people who had long since come and gone in the interim who had likewise invested a considerable amount of time into the game as well.
Uh, my post did kind of acknowledge I was shifting the definition with the whole “By the Vanilla standard” part of the statement. People are going to min/max and utilize out of game resources that are far more detailed and comprehensive than anything that existed 15 years ago. People doing that 15 years ago were “power gamers” no matter how you want to look at it now.
The only thing that makes them not so now is the time commitment aspect, but there still is that whole matter of how they do approach it while they are playing.
That even more than a small fraction of a fraction of the player population has a realistic chance of full clearing MC in 2 months is proof of my point.
Full clear MC in Vanilla took five months(154 days) for the world first guilds. That’s a rather big change.
Totally agree. Blizzard will definitely take the easier/more profitable route which is TBC. Classic+ is not even remotely as popular an idea except for a very small percentage of the Classic players
This is Blizzard we’re talking about. They don’t talk about things until they’re good and ready to talk about them. Just because they refuse to talk about it doesn’t mean anything. Classic TBC is the logical next step and a very easy call to make.
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Threads bookmarked at this point and I have a reminder on my phone set. I look forward to a revisit. Lots of oddball things going on in this one. More so than most other threads. I suspect much of this talk will die down greatly after release though. Much of this is pre-release jitters with nothing better to do. Always a thing.
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True. And a huge amount of the discussions we are having in both threads is merely speculation and conjecture, hypothetical and theoretical. But a lot of it is sound based off of the premise that Classic will be successful. Given that ends up being true, they’d be fools not to put out BC/Wrath later on also. Splitting up the community sounds bad to some, but to me it would benefit both the game and Blizzard as well as the players. Letting everyone have the freedom to CHOOSE their options was what this game USED to be all about.
I love how that response is almost a verbatim version of a refrain I’m been constantly saying since the end of last year. Classic TBC is going to very easy in comparison to what Classic WoW itself was as a project.
The biggest issue with TBC isn’t in creating the “modern TBC client/server” but in trying to address the other associated issues that crop up when you introduce a third version of WoW into the mix. Both from the maintainability side, and the community side of things.
I’m still putting money on most of their efforts between now and then(when they’re not working on Classic itself) will be in trying to find ways to address the “community issues” that a third(and eventual fourth in the form of Wrath) version of the game is likely to create.
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Which is why I think it’s more likely that “Classic+” would end up being rolled into Retail, assuming they can work out the tech to make it possible.
It’ll be a better deal for all involved, if done well, but it’s going to piss almost everybody off for awhile, I’m sure. Some of them will never stop complaining, but they would have been complaining in any case.
Not jitters, just boredom. The game being live will take care of that for the most part.