Basing my opinion on the pulse I can see when playing classic, and people I know who returned, there wont be a large unsub exodus soon.
People in chat seem like they are having fun. Trade chat is bustling with activity so much you cant get a word in really.
No one is really complaining about anything in game.
I think classic pop stays large for a while.
I mean Classic GD is actually more active than general GD.
layers I think will have very little effect.
Retail players who come to take a look will miss certainly QoL items and go back.
The queues will cause some to quit.
Faction imbalances on PvP servers making one faction unable to progress will cause people to quit.
The fact that it’s just not the game they remember (rose coloured glasses not that it’s a different game) will cause people to quit.
Some came just to ‘take a look at what they missed’ and will just leave after a short time.
Once all that happens then Classic will have it’s ‘stable’ population.
It’s not so much giving up, and I fully think blizz will fix the stuff… but I’d rather do it after they do. Preferably with a fresh server experience. I have a feeling they will do new realm ladder releases all the time. The reason for that is pserver players do that all the time. I think it will be a lot of fun, but I’d like things like layers and gameplay to be fixed up before then.
Got to 48 and already unsubbed. The layering, the bugs, the lack of customer support, lack of patches, lack of realms at launch, the lack of blizzard putting in any effort whatsoever to improve the game. I knew Blizzard was a pitiful company, but I thought I’d give it a chance. Had much more fun playing on a private server for the last 6 months so I got my fix. I’m out and happy I can utilize my time on more productive means.
If I had not heard about layering in Blizzard’s prerelease statements and not read about its exploitation here, I would never know that layering was even in Classic. It’s imperceptible to me.
The game world feels completely seamless and persistent just like it did before cross-realm zoning and sharding was (unfortunately) introduced in Retail, so a hat tip from me to the Classic devs.