While splitting the player base across multiple game types is a real one that can effect low population games. Wow literally has millions of players across dozens of servers.
When people talk about splitting the wow player base by adding TBC, I do not see it happening in a real way. There will still be more people playing retail than any other MMO could dream to have. There will be a large vibrant and dedicated Vanilla community. There will be an absurdly massive TBC community.
100k players still playing Vanilla, will have a huge population of people playing across 1-3 servers easily, private servers did it with less most of the time and had tons of people playing.
If you are worried about a split player base, don’t there will be plenty of people playing across multiple versions of the game. In fact, subscription numbers will probably go up as people play different versions as they so choose.
There are a lot of people that love Vanilla, there are even more that want TBC, and with all its faults, there will be a lot of people that want Wrath.
There will still be some dedicated people that love that slot machine, constant dopamine drip from retail, with all of its “the metrics say players like this!”
(That hack that did the 2017 GDC talk that went on to say everything wrong with retail WoW but laughably he presented it as if it was a good thing, I wont name him but you can find it it is titled Rewards in Video Games on Youtube GDC channel)
Wow of course is well populated. No argument there.
Our primary concern is in the leveling dungeons. Even in vanilla it was a serious project to get a group under way sometimes. It’s simply the design of the game, dividing folks up into a large amount of categories even a single server of people (grammar hard). And then you have further divisions like the amount of hours in a day and play style.
I’ve already run into pretty serious trouble on my medium population Realm with the beginning dungeons. I definitely disagree that population will grow over time.
I am going to make a bold prediction and this has been my prediction since the begining, as ZG and AQ 20 come out, the population will increase, right now you have guilds doing most raids in 1 maybe 2 days, and they have 5-6 days with nothing to do, they log off, log on when it is time to raid.
With 20 mans and having 3 full 40 man raids with multiple bosses, populations will pick back up, there will be more people playing more often, and people will be incentivized to level alts, because they can gear those alts in 20 mans. Their mains will be tied up doing multiple 40 man raids. So the population will pick up. Because people will be playing a lot more.
In TBC there are tons of reasons to get alts people leveled them for various reasons, there is a lot of content right off the bat to do, there is a 10 man raid and 25 man raid content available from launch with Black temple not too far after that. People will have a lot more stuff to do and ways to gear up alts to make them useful without having to get 40 people together for the 1 night a week raid.
you forgot to account for raid loggers and daily schedules. a high pop server exists to supply all items onto the ah and all services, without a high pop everyone left has to pitch in or else you end u without consumables or world buffs or crafted which is a large portion of the game.
you end up having to play 3x as much to compensate which most people cant do. thats why dwindling populations suffer.
world bosses like azuregos are a pipedream by all but the largest guild who decides on a whim to go after him.
A lot of retail players didn’t want anything to do with classic. They didn’t want the playerbase split up. Now the diehard classic fans that only want classic will try to deny TBC as much as possible because they don’t want the playerbase split up.
If there is a TBC, I’m positive that all 3 iterations of wow playable at the time will be fine and all 3 can coincide well.
It would be wierd to have classic, tbc and wrarh servers where the major difference for a new player would be unonticiable. They all have the same low level quests, same dungeons, same NPCs etc with the exceptiom of a single continent. Doesnt make sense, blizzard should just keep upgrading from classic to wrath.
EverQuest has been doing this with the TLP servers for years with a lot of success and they put out a expansion every year vs. WoW two years. So WoW could do it as well if they wanted to. Why they haven’t done it yet is a mystery?
Even on Herod, one of the bigger servers, getting a full group to run lower level dungeons has become a slog depending on the range
Separate TBC clients will exacerbate this, WillE made a vid on this topic the other day and he explains all the possibilities well.
The majority of wow players are playing classic and thats a fact.
Will shadowlands change that? My guess is no because its following the same formula as BFA and they already said classes won’t change much. I am also guessing they will continue to take a giant crap on pvp’rs
When pvp is trash in wow then all of wow suffers, history shows.
If you’re posting on the forums, you should already know that the ONLY reason Classic WoW exists is because 400,000 rational people from Nostalrious signed a petition forcing Blizzard to make it, for them and only them.
If they release TBC Classic, then those 400,000 rational diehard Vanilla or nothing else people won’t have anyone to play with.
When you compare to pserver data - they could do nearly all expansions as “classic” versions and still have full servers - it just wouldnt be a ton of servers.
The average “healthy” pserver population was 2k peak players. They could easily have 4k server caps and have a bursting server that feels alive 2-3 times over. I just hope they dont do what they did with Classic with the 10k+ population. This makes farming a nightmare.
Yep, and EQ not being owned by Sony anymore and run by Daybreak games, who seem to be milking the franchise for all its worth. And true they might be able to or they might not. Who knows why. Maybe they can’t see profit in the older content on the newer hard ware?
I knew that Classic WoW was a response to a player demand for a copy of the “original WoW – BEFORE all the Blizzard changes”. I saw that player demand in the WoW forums over the last several years. It is the reason I’m a #nochanger: the player demand was for the Vanilla game, not some new improved version of it.
But I didn’t know about the petition. Thank you.
Out of all the people who signed that petition, there would have been quite a substantial amount who would have wanted classic… to actually continue on to tbc and wrath. If there was 400,000 people who signed it, that doesn’t mean those 400,000 people wanted classic and only classic and that’s it.
Really depends on what we’re talking about with introducing TBC. Is it overriding Classic where it’s Standard vs TBC Classic? Or, is it 3 categories: Standard, Classic, TBC? The latter I have no qualms about.
Classic, Classic TBC and retail. I’ve read comments from people stating they don’t want TBC at all and don’t ever want to see it happen. Pretty selfish really but I guess that’s their opinion.