If I have to pick, 4. I’d prefer 3 without having to pay, but if I had to pay I wouldn’t want it and might actually just quit if I feel like crap on that particular announcement day.
But I am ok with everyone having to start at level 1. That wouldn’t bother me. I know my brother probably wouldn’t want to though so it’s kinda /shrugworthy.
alot of people rolled class race combos based on of the ideal classic wow raid comp, for a more diverse TBC there will need to be a some kind of option to mix things up a little
I prefer 1.
While TBC did bring some improvements to the game, it also was the beginning of many changes that seriously negatively impacted the feel of the world.
Everything relevant became condensed to a very small continent.
Crafting materials stopped feeling like you were gathering appropriate items, everything was made primarily with motes.
Flying mounts removed all danger in the world, and made PvP server combat dumb due to the lack of interaction caused by them.
Dungeons stopped feeling like real places, and instead felt like 1 hour long hallways. The “city” of tempest keep was like 4 rooms with nothing in them.
Arenas caused class balance to be focused on an individual’s ability to kill someone in 2s/3s in a small room with pillars rather then in larger objective based combat. This caused the beginning of class toolkit homogenization due to arenas being the primary gearing path in PvP.
PvP balance was incredibly bad with the new arena focus. Several classes had no functional comp to work with in 2s/3s.
The badge system was the start of the auto catch up mechanics that allowed players to jump very quickly to higher tiered content, skipping much of the game by running the intro raid (karazhan) repeatedly.
It threw out one of vanilla’s better features of having low level items retain value due to interesting/fun design on them. Any item that continued to be useful was systematically nerfed. Because of this, gearing became less interesting.
It introduced daily quests, and the rapid gold inflation caused by them (not to mention the fact that they are boring and lazy content).
Faction imbalance got worse due to blood elves being just better than draenei. (And also were better ret paladins than alliance got)
The higher level cap made TBC feel like it shrank the game rather than expanded upon it (a problem that every expansion after that repeated) by invalidating all of the previous content.
TBC legendaries were no longer a guild goal, they just dropped. (And the hunter legendary was super lazy)
TBC was where the game first felt like everything was designed from the ground up to be an efficient game mechanic rather than a living world first. Quests took you to every corner of the map. You were pointed to explore everything. Materials and dungeons were streamlined too far.
TBC did make some things better (hybrid specs gained value, guild banks were nice, the de-emphasis on consumables was appreciated), but it was the beginning of many of the things that killed WoW for me.
How to do TBC servers.
2 weeks before launch let people select characters to COPY to TBC realms (pvp must stay pvp, exc)
After a character has been copied the classic character will be flagged to be unable to be copied again.
After TBC launches watch classic realm activity for 1 month. The lowest pop realms should be merged.
This gives TBC the progression mark with out chosen toons.
Then when TBC launches also create a handful of fresh realms. (Lvl1 start) for new players joining for TBC.
This is nothing more than a pipe dream. ActiBlizz isn’t going to spend the money it takes to get devs on such a project. It creates a game that competes with their own game, and there are more old versions that they could release FAR more easily to feed the nostalgia.
You might have been able to convince 2005 Blizzard to do this… but that company is gone.
I mean, actiblizz could open classic+ as a form of community “mods” similar to Skyrim and just have the content sent in for approval to use.
Basically getting free workers from the fan base.
You would turn off as many players as it would attract. It’s not a smart business decision by any means.
Yeah I now the bean counters at activision wouldn’t want to spend money/time on this. But classic initially more than tripled the subscriptions to WoW. They were making tens of millions extra a month. And I’m guessing they’ve seen more than 50% of those new subscriptions cancelled now due to unbalanced pvp servers and P2, and the inability to find a group for anything lower than BRD as all content below lv50 has now been effectively abandoned other than power-level carries as nobody wants to actually play an alt anymore.
Plus all the spreadsheet warriors will only run dungeons that have their BiS, and they will always reserve it, and after they have their gear they’ll only raid log.
The pvpers just grind BGs till they hit their rank, buy their gear, then they quit playing.
The economy is royally messed up on most servers. Anything that is somewhat rare (black lotus for example) is being farmed 24/7 and bought up by auction bots and relisted for several times what it went for in vanilla, even as the server populations die and slowly slide back down to vanilla levels. Unless you have a character specialized in farming gold in DM or Mara or some other gimmick, you basically can’t afford anything in the current server economy for the average player. Which is leading even more casuals looking for the vanilla experience to quit.
The servers are effectively turning into ghost towns.
They could hire 10 people to work on new content for classic, and bring back millions a month in revenue by finishing content that was already half finished. And it would cost them a fraction of 1 month worth of revenue from the classic player base per year. People would actually explore and play the game again.
Without actual new content, I think we’re going to see continuous attrition every month as more cancel their subscriptions due to the problems with the current player base and the way they play. You might see a 2 month spike in BC subscriptions, but that’ll be it. People will all hit 70 in 1 week. And BC raids weren’t really staggered, so they’ll be raiding and clearing everything in month 1 already after people get gear from a few heroic dungeons. The PvPers will win trade to get to the top, to claim they’re the “best at pvp” unless blizzard patches/fixes that like they did classic battleground exploits.
Without new content it’s just going to be a bunch of people trying to min/max and exploit their way to the top to get the best gear the fastest to stroke their nerd-egos. And the servers will slowly decline and shrink.
Honestly, I think half the reason private servers were so popular, is because they were mostly free. People aren’t going to be willing to pay $15/month for what classic has turned into and what BC will continue to be when they release it.
I vote for option 5, Let Blizzard introduce a one >>> way >>> quest line.
Start the quest and it auto transfers the character to TBC server through the opening of the dark portal. They could allow this for one or all characters on an account. Again, one way, once you go through the portal, that character is forever TBC. Want to do classic again, fine, start a new character on a classic server.
This.
If people get Baron mounts or ZG mouts or winterspring mounts and have to reroll for BC… Lmao.
/thread
#3 sans the cash
Need to progress ALL servers, and have the option to xfer to Classic only servers, otherwise what do you think will happen to all the exsisting classic servers once 90% of the player base moves on to TBC?
Xfering to new Classic only servers would let you re-establish servers with healthy long-term populations, rather than have a whole lot of ghost town servers
Of course the easiest leveling class wouldn’t mind a fresh start.
As someone who has zero interest in doing tbc again, that’s one of the better ideas I’ve seen. It lets people have their feeling of progression into tbc while also letting vanilla players be somewhere that provides for healthy populations. It could be an opportunity to address faction ratio in the process if xfer to a classic server includes faction xfer.
Old way was you didn’t buy tbc you could still play you just couldn’t access the new area. Not seeing an issue with that.
From a money standpoint that is probably be what will happen. Why spend on 40 more servers when you don’t need to. We will see though.
How about, progess some servers to TBC, and HAVE some FRESH ONLY SERVERS??? EVERYONE would be happy then, and you could have classic only servers as well.
yeah sure, you itself sit and grind again to level 60 and then to 70. Then do all the progression then go to TBC.
1, 3, and 4.
Keep Classic up with server merges as necessary due to declining pops. Blizz’s call if they want to start doing “seasons” for Classic a’la D3.
Open BC as a seperate service, you can transfer your Classic character to BCC to continue leveling (I say all free, one way. But knowing Blizz it’ll be first one free rest paid)
And otherwise you can reroll at level 1 in BCC. This would be the only option for Blood Elves and Draenei. Or if you want to play a new class you don’t have on Classic.
And most importantly, no level 58 boost.