And be weeks behind. If the 2.43 leveling buffs for 1 - 60 are as I predict, it would still take about 100 hours to hit 60. Playing 20-30 hours a week that’s three weeks. Another week or two to hit level 70 for sure. The people in full Naxx BiS with 10,000g will be 70 with epic flying probably 2-3 days after release.
You can’t understand why people might not want to be ganked non-stop by epic flying geared out 70s or have to compete on 60% ground mounts with 280% flyers for gathering materials?
Someone starting from level 1 on these servers would never, ever, be competitive in a PvE or PvP environment in the entire expansion. So they’re not interested. I get it, but it sucks.
I just hope Blizzard announces fresh servers for TBC, even if they let people character copy on separate, specially marked servers. And, yes, I think the fresh ones will attract 200, 300 maybe 400% of the interest. I think you underestimate how many hardcore Classic people are left. Maybe 50,000? How many people do you think will want to play TBC? Millions. 5mil, 6mil? More than Classic, for sure. TBC is a much better experience than Classic. I know an entire family (husband, wife, daughter and his brother) that are very interested in TBC that wanted nothing to do with Classic.
People will want a fresh start. This forum has an extreme selection bias of decked out hardcore Classic players afraid to “lose their progress” in the museum they signed up for.
If you have a character copied main with all that gold and guild resource you can catch up easier. Economically, you’d have no set-back. In terms of leveling, you could make up the time lost on the 1-60 trek by being fed gear from your decked out guild that has Kara, Gruul and Mag on farm one week after release.
Edit: But if you’re implying no character copy AT ALL. Just freshly leveling an alliance shaman on launch day. Yeah, you’re screwed.
You have a 60 Alliance paladin you character copy with 9000g and a bank full of TBC-valuable mats. You make a fresh Alliance shaman. You still have a massive advantage over someone leveling fresh. You could buy yourself spell ranks, mounts, flight and enchants like fiery or crusader to make your leveling much smoother. Greens and blues all the way up (in fact, I’d start buying some of that gear off the AH now, leather before 40, mail after for shaman).
Are you seriously comparing starting the expansion fully fresh versus making an alliance shaman with the support of your progression copied main AND your established guild?
I have always played both. It was literally impossible for my Belf paladin or Draenei shaman to equal my guildies, no matter how much gold I pumped into them, because I still had to level them.
I sometimes think people mis-evaluated those classes in that expansion for that reason.
No amount of gold, nor pimpin gear, can erase the fact that they had to go from 60-70 whilst I went from 1-70.
Soooo you’re agreeing with me. People aren’t going to want to play TBC if they have to deal with that. Personally, I’m freakin’ surrounded by friends that will only play a fresh TBC experience for this purpose. Maybe that’s a rarity. I don’t think it is.
I did something similar. I want to play a dranei and a B-elf so I didn’t roll a shaman and a paladin. I’m trying to limit my altohalism this time around and only play one of each class. I’m not going to play my 60’s again from level 1 along with the level 1 Dranei shaman and Belf paladin.
And we’ve cycled back to the exact same argument that I guess i’ll just repost… you say you’ll quit if they do, other people say they won’t play if they don’t.
From my experience with original TBC, it’s almost impossible to catch up as an alliance shaman or horde paladin unless you out neckbeard the neckbeards.
But yet, it’s also unfair to ask people to give up their characters.
I believe Blizzard will do both; they’ll allow character copies to a number of realms, and have a separate batch of EST, CST and PST realms that are excluded and will be genuinely fresh starts. The “best of both worlds” so to speak, although I’d expect the fresh start realms to be wildly more popular. People overestimate how many folks have decked out, gold capped 60s they cling to.
That’d be depressing. Imagine an expansion launching but having to slog through 58 levels of Classic again until you can even play it.
When Classic TBC launches, they should take a “snapshot” of the entire character database from Classic and have it available on the new client, realms and all. It wouldn’t be possible to level to 60 then “transfer” over to a TBC realm while preserving that character in Vanilla Classic; the two games would exist seperately from the moment that TBC launches without interfering with each other.
Correct. No one wants to deal with that. If you have to roll a fresh level 1 versus naxx BiS geared and gold capped 60s on release night? Why even bother? Annnd they won’t. My friends have made it quite clear they want no part of that.
Fresh or they don’t play.
Simultaneously, people are saying “if I can’t keep my character I won’t play”.
How can that be at this point in the game. I’m not in a hard core guild and I’m on a low pop rp pve server and every one I know has at least one 60 if not a few. Rp pve servers are known for being behind the other servers in every way. Slower to level and slower to raid.
Classic was not particularly popular for a lot of people. It’s a pretty awful experience. The leveling is slow and tedious, the class balance is atrocious, half the specs in the game aren’t viable, the end-game is unidimensional, no rated PvP, etc etc.
TBC is an entirely different animals. Tons of reputations, pre-raid sets, better professions, heroic dungeons, twice as many end-game raids, diverse PvP sets, rated arena, nearly every spec in the game is raid viable…
Only one of my buddies really played Classic with me and hit 60 with me. About 6 to 7 of them are quite excited to try TBC but wanted nothing to do with Classic. I don’t think this is a particularly unusual opinion.