Progressive Servers – How to keep Vanilla WoW alive for the long haul.
Based on the recent survey sent by Blizzard, they are considering different ways to keep original Classic (Vanilla) alive and interesting to players. I personally have thought about this a lot, going back to the announcement of Classic World of Warcraft. This is my multistep process on how to help the current community of Classic diehards and hopefully maintain interest in the game long term.
Step 1 – Superservers
There are currently 41 Classic servers serving the North American region, spread across a handful of sub regions: US West, US East, Oceanic, Latin America and Brazil. I would propose collapsing those regions into super server clusters. 2 PVP, 1 PVE, and 1 RPPVP superserver each in US West and US East, and 1 PVP and 1 PVE server in Oceanic. Latin America and Brazil each only have 1 classic server, so their region would remain unchanged. This would concentrate the remaining player base as densely as possible, hopefully fostering merged communities and ongoing access to group content.
Step 2 – Progressive Servers
Blizzard would create 9 new servers; 2 PVP and 2 PVE each on US West and US East, as well as 1 PVP on Oceanic. These would be fresh realms set up similarly to the Classic launch servers, possibly with some QoL changes*. They would be designed to run for roughly 2 years before being wiped and restarted. After 1 year, a second set of 2 year servers would be started in order to allow players an opportunity to join fresh realms once a year every year.
Content release progression would follow a set schedule based on a cleaned up version of the original Classic release schedule.
Phase 1 - 10 weeks and would include all of the normal launch content + Mauradon.
Phase 2 - 4 weeks to introduce Dire Maul as new end game content, and provide additional time for low level players to catch up.
Phase 3 - 12 weeks to introduce Honor Systems, Battlegrounds, and World Bosses.
Phase 4 – 4 weeks to introduce Black Wing Lair and the Darkmoon Faire.
Phase 5 – 16 weeks to introduce Zul’Gurub, Arathi Basin, and the Green Dragons, as well as to give additional time to clear Black Wing Lair.
Phase 6 – 18 weeks to introduce Ahn’Qiraj including the war effort event.
Phase 7 – 2 weeks to bring the Scourge Invasion event before Naxxramas.
Phase 8 – 20 weeks to implement and allow players time to clear Naxxramas.
Phase 9 – 4 weeks to implement and make available the Classic transfer window. During this time players would freely be able to transfer to any superserver in their region, or pay to transfer to any Classic superserver.
Phase 10 – 8 weeks to introduce TBC prepatch and make Blood Elves and Dranei available as playable races.
Phase 11 – 2 weeks to implement and make available the TBC transfer window. During this time players would freely be able to transfer to any TBC Classic server of the same type and in the same region, or could pay for a transfer to a TBC Classic server of the same type in a different region.
Phase 12 – 2 weeks server is wiped and shut down, at the end of the two weeks it would relaunch from the beginning of phase 1.
This includes 2 weeks of unaccounted for time in case of delays or issues. The whole schedule could also be tightened to have all content release over an 18 month schedule by trimming a few weeks here and there.
*QoL changes could include bug fixes, increased experience gain, increased gold gain, or other similar changes depending on the sentiments of the community at large and what is judged to be best for the player base. I personally would increase exp gain from levels 10-20 by 10%, increase exp gain from 20-60 by 20%, and increase all gold drops by 20% on enemies over level 40.
Step 3 – Monitoring and Feedback
Blizzard has to take an active position on monitoring the health and welfare of these realms. General surveys could be taken every 4 months and market research could be done to gauge ongoing interest in continuing the WoW Classic experience.
TL:DR Further condense current classic servers to increase population density, then implement new servers with a content release schedule and expiration date of 18-24 months.