Do people realize they can invest more/less in one team than another, right? Or they can invest equal amounts, but that’s just as bad. If they are investing just as much into SL and future expansions as they are into the ones that already exist? The ones they don’t have to actually develop since they already exist?
Edit- and I see you do realize that.
I get the feeling this is one of those threads where op is just screaming into the void and if you don’t nod and make agreeing noises you’re a big dumb dumb whos not even worth responding to yet he keeps making sure you know that.
they have completely separate teams for shadowlands and classic. just because tbc is launching doesn’t mean they’re devoting resources from retail and using them on it. if retail gets messed up that’s ian hazzicostas and the retail team’s fault, and if tbc is botched it’s holly longdale and the tbc team’s fault. seperate games, seperate teams.
TBC is where the money is at now. SL is finished.
That’s funny.
Should we wager a bet?
Who gets more hearts!? Your insult or my OP.
I guess that will answer the lonely void question for ya.
Here. Have a heart to get ya started. 
Alts don’t count! Only public profiles.
I doubt the recent stumbles in BfA and Shadowlands have anything to do with Classic.
The troubles with the past couple xpacs are in my mind the result of trying to pump the investment:profit ratio of modern WoW as high as it can possibly be — everything in Shadowlands points to them trying to turn WoW into a cash cow that mostly flies itself with less need of expensive periodic content infusions. Why pay your artists and developers to create more new things when you can just squeeze what’s already there harder?
If any game is to blame for all of this it’s those trash P2W games that rake in far more profit than any game ever should. No company can resist the siren’s song those represent, and Blizzard is no exception.
SL is actually doing really well, they just need to not mess up 9.1. but like i said, it’s not classic’s fault if retail sucks.
I was Hardcore EQ2 guy until about 8 years ago and you have absolutely NAILED it… well said post. Echoes of Faydwer, in my view, was one of the best expansions of any game I have ever played (except for maybe EQ Planes of Power - that changed the MMO world)
but anyway, you perfectly explained what happened there and looks to be happening here.
Each team is funded according to priorities set by activision and blizzard working together. If they wanted to invest in WoW rather than making it appear it has already slipped into a maintenance mode, the money is there. WoW has always been a cash cow for the company, but the funds could go in either direction.
The staff they laid off were in the esports division, which were probably people that were no longer needed since they don’t have live events anymore…
but do go on.
The thing is, there’s not much to do with funds in Classic, especially since the bulk of the hard work was completed with Vanilla Classic (TBC’s data formats are very similar to Vanilla’s, so the work carries over).
If they start doing a “Classic+” sort of thing that has new content that changes the equation, but until then Classic of any flavor is quite cheap to run relative to the main game.
Thanks bro.
There’s always Aradune…
And when I say Aradune, I ain’t talking about no crappy Time Locked Progression Server!
Have you forgotten all the QA people they laid off during BfA? Maybe they would have caught the VDH mitigation bugs if they’d bothered to test instead of waiting for someone to publicly embarrass them with test results they should have generated themselves.
What interfered with BFA was imagination, as in a lack of. It appears that the same thing has interfered with SL as well.
Semper Fi! 
My point still is that if Shadowlands was “benched” (as the title put it), it’s because they chose to do this, not because of any interplay between new expansions and re-release.
You do realize that they have two different teams right? The team working on Classic and BC Classic are not the same team that is working on retail.
They will most likely do what they did with Classic, you won’t have to buy it or pay for it in any additional way. If you have game time on retail, you’ll have the exact same amount of time on BC Classic.
Yeah that’s true.
Honestly I think they’ve been looking for a way to put WoW on the back burner for a while now, potentially as far back as WoD — Ghostcrawler mentioned that when he left one the team’s top priorities was figuring out a way to make WoW more sustainable.
You obviously have no idea about software development in a multi-platform environment…
Agile development?
Have you ever heard of JIRA or any other methodology for managing software development for multiple end user platforms or even multiple software client versions and platforms?
Developers aren’t on just their one little team. Cycles. Leaps. Push dates and test, dev, qa and live environments?
The difference between a dev environment and a production environment?
I don’t think you do fully grasp. Because if you did. You would know that devs are placed on all teams and it’s up to a PMO to decide what he is capable of accomplishing in what period of time and which projects to work on during which time of day.
Mostly these decisions are influenced by management, but a developer RARELY has free will to work on ANYTHING he wants to work on willy nilly.
If you are a level designer, network coder, systems engineer or any other type of developer, the ONLY TIME you are EVER the dev of only ONE PRODUCT at a company is if you are an intern, extremely legacy developer with no modern education supporting a dying product most likely tied to government or banking applications or YOU ONLY HAVE ONE PRODUCT.
Otherwise, THERE IS NO SEPARATE CLASSIC/RETAIL TEAM from a human bodies and names perspective. There is only a separate team in respect to keeping the information/schedule related to the projects aligned without overlap and separate to prevent cross contamination of data, mostly.
probably i’d unsub. NOT everyone cares for classic some people only play retail. i dont mind classic its just the fact that people are just buying carries to level and all that bs so it feels like the community doesn’t exist compared to the first few months it came out. retail is the same but at least we have LFG/QoL.
i really dont have high hopes for tbc in terms of longevity. classic players are gonna steam roll tf out of it. of course were expecting subs to rise drastically that is gonna be NO surprise then it gonna drop hard which again is no surprise.
in the end banking on classic to carry your retail game isn’t a good idea. once people quit they don’t always want to come back. why you gonna waste $15 to play a game that left a bad taste in your mouth maybe multiple times as well? see it makes no sense. thats like someone running back to their toxic af ex and complaining their ex is still toxic.
If this is what they are doing which I have no proof of then 
All the classic players who will stop getting content updates but still pay will be funding retail for years 
Thanks classic bros