First of all, if you think a particular response would cause your customers to “lose their minds,” then perhaps you should rethink that response. Secondly, if the company has a valid reason for reaching a decision they believe may be unpopular, they need to communicate that reason. And lastly, no one would be any more frustrated or angry with a “no” answer than they already are for being completely ignored.
Customers like to feel valued and respected. That’s just business 101. If Blizzard were at all a reputable company they would have already stated their intentions.
One of the problems is cost…it will cost them $$$ to open servers so they probably won’t. The other bit is…the entire reason there is a need for new servers is because they did an absolute GARBAGE job of handling classic and let millions upon millions of gold into the market with multiboxing/botting/and yes, even some duping. Then they didn’t crack down on gold buying, only gold selling…and even then that’s only a PR stunt when a video exposing the state of things gets enough traction. So in a way, adding new servers would be admitting they screwed up. The biggest reason for a new server is the economy, and perhaps a fresh grind, the funny bit is i venture they could even generate a profit by charging money to start on a new server…but that idea escapes them. Regardless…for a fresh server to even work and not just become another farce full of so much gold it ruins the server then they would have to make fundamental changes which they, quite simply, will never do because it will cost them $$$…and if you pay attention that’s ALL blizzard cares about, making more $$$.
I believe, assisted with the explanations towards why the character copy cost is as high as it is, that Blizzard wants us to move most of our Classic Era characters to TBC and allow them to shrink the servers down to a smaller number.
Having fresh TBC servers will divert from this as many people will just leave their Classic Era characters in Classic then which would dampen this goal. As such they might be silent due to this reason, that they have an agenda to shorten Classic Era servers down.
the servers that ActiBli$$ion use are Hewlett-Packard, as-cheap-as-possible servers. They really went into the back alleys with Classic servers. ActiBli$$ion could throw out blades (blade systems) faster than it took those two engineers to polish off that mount and two toys (probably a day).
Creating a few fresh servers…with the blades I could probably do it myself. Literally a few servers with reset 1s and zero economy. Everything clean. It would be way easier than the route they’re taking with "Retail TBC."
All I can ascertain is straight up, ActiBli$$ion doesn’t want to say.
That’s the catch, classic is a new game, 1-60 is an integral part of the experience, and a large portion of the game. BC is an expansion, it’s not a new game. It was an expansion in 2007, and it’s an expansion now.
Who cares what they answer. We tell them what kind of fresh server we want. We pay them a subscription fee, times how ever many thousand players want to play on fresh servers. Many won’t be paying if certain circumstances aren’t met. There is nothing wrong with demanding quality for a game you pay a monthly fee for. Pretty easy. ActiBli$$ion runs old-school, bottom of the barrel servers. Throw a few up with level 1 and reset economies. I mean, I don’t know how many times we have defined exactly what we want as a fresh community. If they read the posts, they are not idiots.
That’s not just classic. Botting has been rampant in retail as well. It’s because they got rid of actual GM’s. It’s clearly not that hard to get past blizz’s anti-cheat system. And gold buying isn’t as obvious of an issue to players in retail because of tokens.
I’ll be around for the prepatch, but sub will run out before TBC launch. I’ll just be sitting on the sidelines waiting on a fresh option. Unfortunately my voice will be silenced and Blizz will have no idea they could get me to resub simply by offering a fresh option. Wonder if there’s a lot of people in a similar situation.
Yeah because the population was growing, massively. It wasn’t because Blizz thought players wanted F R E S H. Just like in 2007 if the existing servers arent enough to support the playerbase, they’ll open new ones.
The first part is true, but the second is pure supposition on your part.
The playerbase was growing, but there were plenty of low pop servers. And Blizz still added fresh servers. I’d say it’s quite likely they wanted to provide players with a fresh option. Otherwise they could have just locked servers and forced new characters on the low pop servers. But they didn’t. Instead they added fresh ones even though they weren’t really necessary.
Saying the last new server opened in 2009 it’s pretty safe to say they were only opened to deal with a growing population. They haven’t added a single server since the population began to decline. If so many players want a fresh experience, you’d thing they’d open a handful of new servers every expac, but they don’t. F R E S H is a private server thing, blizzard opened servers to address population, nothing more, nothing less.
You could say that became their business strategy. Perhaps earlier on they wanted to offer a fresh experience to new players. But seeing as the game stopped growing, there were less and less new players and thus less and less reason to offer a fresh experience. The fact remains there were a lot of very low pop servers when they kept adding new servers.
By the way this ‘fresh is a private server thing’ is utter nonsense. Just look at the people posting on this issue. Pretty much universally say we’ve never played on a private server. But even if you want to equate fresh to private servers…so what? You realize Classic was made because of private servers, right? Blizzard emulating private servers made them a boatload of profits. So then fine…do it again.
