There is a lot of debate right now on how forever should be designed, Group A wants a long grindy, quest based system, where “the journey” matters, and they want to eliminate as many retail influences as they can.
Group B wants more QoL options, and the ability to level how they want, be it questing or doing dungeons.
Of these two groups which one do you think is more likely to put money on the table when Blizzard starts dropping more DLC for the game? Be it cosmetic, or pets, or even races and classes. Who do you think, of these two groups, is the most likely to actually engage in the money trade for in game content?
Because at the end of the day they are the group Blizzard is most likely to listen to in the long run. You cant sell things to the whales if the whales don’t like swimming in your pool.
Before anybody says how do we know Blizzard is even going to have that kind of thing in forever, well they already did it. The blue elves and an entire starting zone is locked behind real money already.
So which of those two camps do you guys think will produce the whales that makes developing forever profitable for them?
Your poll already makes 0 sense. Dungeons during leveling aren’t a retail influence. Dungeons have been a core part of both vanilla and classic wow. There’s nothing retail about it..
You’re already completely misinformed and I suggest you should actually play era for a while until you realize what the gameplay is actually like in that game.
Raid logging pays the bills. Raid loggers stay subscribed. Watch your GM say, 'we’re taking a 2 month break, so we’ll be back to raid in a couple months", and watch how many of your guildies unsub. In my anecdotal experience, it happens every single time the guild leadership takes a break in scheduling/running raids. That’s in original WoW, modern Retail, and Classic.
End game raiding, and even Mythic+ dungeon progression, is what keeps people subscribed, not leveling. Levelers come and go. A few months here, a few months there.
It’s really hard to say. I’d think both groups would be willing to pay for a product that interests them.
That being said, my intuition is existing retail players are more likely to whale out, for a few reasons, most of which have to do with player retention for Classic players.
Retail players never dropped sub. They liked what Blizzard did, or at least, were willing to put up with it. By contrast, a lot of the market Blizz is trying to recapture did choose to leave - meaning they’re more likely to make that choice a second time. At least you’d think.
Related to the above, classic players are comparatively harder to please. They want fresh content, but it seems like most of them have different ideas about what “the line” is (e.g. look at the discourse on player housing). Not only do they have stricter standards, but those standards are also variable, meaning you’d lose some proportion of players from that demographic no matter what.
On top of the stricter standards, at least for now, the art pipeline seems primed to disappoint them. It’s been discussed to death, but the new assets do not resemble the old art style, and the result is jarring. Coupled with the fact that Blizz had to be talked into implementing an SD version, and I suspect that Blizz thought they could get away with using modern assets in the modern style in general. It seems probable that, if they intend to set up a classic-style art pipeline for Forever, it’s only gotten started very recently, or maybe not at all. That means disappointment in the artistic vision for the foreseeable future, which will lead to complaints and dropped subs.
There’s another demographic which I suspect is influential but is little discussed, and may ultimately be more numerous than classic or retail players. I think a large portion of the interest comes from casuals who are more interested in classic gameplay than classic culture. They were slowly alienated by the increasingly complex rotations and encounters that you see in retail, and unsubbed. They just want a simple game they can veg out and play, with all the convenience of retail but none of the complex gameplay. This is obviously at odds with what classic players want, and if I’m right about this, and if this demographic is listened to, that could push out classic players.
But, there’s an argument against long term retention of retail players as well. They might not stick around for a few different reasons.
A problem I’m running into - the rotations are too small. Quest after quest of collecting bear butts by pressing three buttons isn’t terribly engaging. Granted I’ve only hit level 8, but gameplay so far has been a snoozefest. Knowing I have many hours of watching paint dry ahead of me is just kinda… eh. I can do it, and I can enjoy the game in spite of the gameplay, but it wouldn’t be my first pick among the MMO’s I’m playing right now. I think that could filter some of them.
I want more customization for my character - and it’s not there. Yet. It might be one day. Who knows.
The friction of forming groups is too much for them.
Similar to point 1, the endgame might not be enough for them. Raids that are too mechanically simple yet simultaneously too difficult to wrangle enough players for. For my part, classic raiding just seems tedious - so much so that I’ve no interest in it. I’d rather spend my time in the open world. But that demands the world have sufficient content to hold my interest.
Ultimately, time will tell. Though everyone I’ve spoken to more or less expects Forever to eventually end up in a similar place to Retail by boiling the frog.
Numbered lists and occasional use of italics don’t mean AI. There’s barely any lists (x, y, and z), no punchy concluding sentences, and no over-frequent use of “quietly” and other favorite words of AI. I’ve also a tendency to ramble, and that post is no exception.
Though given the number of AI posts I’ve seen in this forum, I can forgive the misunderstanding.
Edit: there’s actually no three part lists in it now that I went back and read it, lol.
I’m not the best of formatting my thoughts out into an easy to read message, so I’ll write something up that is completely butchered but get all my points out and have AI clean it up for me. It’s still my words just cleaned up with a tool, like a way better version of spell check.
All good and well, but I notice that no where in that reply did you actually deny using AI for your post. You’re leading me to infer, without being explicit. Any reason for that?
I would rather someone use their brain to consolidate their thoughts.
They should just let people play and level how they want. I’m not someone who would spam dungeons to level, but if others want to how does that affect me?
