I too enjoy novelty. I get mine through other outlets than gaming. I do mountaineering (working on the Seven Summits since turning 60), I do long distance cycling, play soccer with a duffers team, even play a little flat track roller derby. WoW is a way to relax and just melt into an inner world. I like pvp and bg. I have no interest in raiding and I find dungeons tedious, so I only use them sparingly to gain gear. I don’t expect you or many who enjoy the retail game to have my attitude. But if you don’t think that there are legions of people like me, that dip into wow as a slow, cerebral game, you are being very narrow minded. WoW has lost millions of customers over the last decade with the evolution of the gaming style they deliver. There are at least 500,000 I would guess conservatively who will sub and play Classic, as is, for a very long time. Blizzard will do fine with our money. And they may even start to expand again with Classic as the foundation. But I don’ think they will make the mistake they made over a decade ago and render a fantastic version of the game unavailable.
All that would do is split the population more and more.
Resets are off the table. People would be pissed to get to wherever it is they want to be and then have to start all over again - especially if they come back after a while and their character is gone.
Classic is in all likelihood going to be a static sandbox for the duration of its existence. If it does well enough to get Blizzard’s notice, they’ll just incorporate Vanilla design philosophy into the Modern game - but they’re not going to simultaneously develop two MMOs, especially not ones on the same subscription.
I wonder if all of these people obsessing over things years in advance have even thought about retirement? Are you putting money away? How’s your IRA looking?
Ha.
Blizzard should have every one of their expansions on the game tab on our Battlenet login screen. There would be plenty of activity in each and every one. Many would actively play on multiple versions. They made a serious and costly mistake when they didn’t offer a frozen version of the game at each expansion point. The idea that the player base would be fragmented just doesn’t hunt. People would bounce from version to version as desired and as content in the latest version dried up. Servers are cheap to maintain especially when the game running on them is static.
This is a perfect example of how people’s preferences can radically differ without either being “wrong.” I totally understand why those who love innovation would prefer WoW’s retail version, but not everyone thinks that way.
It was the constant change for the sake of change that ultimately killed my interest in retail WoW and then HotS. The fact that D3 is so static in comparison has made it my favorite Blizzard game for the past year or two. If Classic has a static server option that is frozen in time indefinitely, Classic will almost certainly become my game of choice.
I don’t expect to play the game more than a month honestly. A fun month, a great month, but a month. I assume I’ll come back to it for a few weeks like I do GW2 every year or so because it’s amazing for a quick kick but that’s that. BC I’d play longer and more often and Wrath I’d play forever.
Would lots of people play Wrath forever? I doubt it but people still play Runescape so who knows. Vanilla holds a massive nostalgia for people, even more than Wrath. Wrath people like because it was the best the game ever was. Is that enough though?
I’m still excited for Classic and hope it paves the way for BC and Wrath servers. I’d happily start again in them if I had to but not gonna lie, it’d annoy me not having all my stuff from one expansion to the next. They’d have to just copy the data over though or else you’d have silly situations like friends pooling gold cap on as many characters as possible and taking turns to transfer them over if you could just copy them. I can’t imagine what other exploits you’d do so maybe you’d have to just start all over again as you would starting out on any new server.
I expect there’ll be a long slow decline in the number of Classic players. That might mean server merges eventually. But otherwise it just doesn’t matter. Keeping the power on the Classic servers is going to be a pittance compared to the subscriptions they’ll collect. The current Retail subscription price covers server costs and expansion development. Once released, Classic won’t have any of the latter. Blizzard doesn’t need to keep Classic fresh, it’ll be purely maintenance and profit.
I agree with this. The fact there are a plethora of pservers for just about every expansion (quick google search) it would seem people would be interested in most all of them.
Everyone has a favorite expansion, and at this point anything they can do to keep people subscribed besides retail sounds like a good idea. The more types of Classic servers they make, the more subs they’ll retain and the more people will resub when their favorite expansion of all time drops.
I’m excited for Vanilla because it’s basic, there’s no point of invalidation of the world as happens the second you cross to outland and all level 60 content becomes irrelevant. Others may remember other expansions equally fondly for various reasons. I started in BC so I’d probably play there (as well as Classic Vanilla) just to experience the endgame content I never did originally.
I say why not give the people what they want (and kill the pserver community while they’re at it).
It’s classic, its vanilla wow up to naxx and nothing after it. Get over any other thought.
If you want more added onto the game then play retail.
I don’t think anyone’s talking about adding things, if anything they’re discussing resets, which I am so wholeheartedly against I would suffer through retail or play a different game if it meant I couldn’t ever keep my characters. Thankfully that will be at most an option, as I’m sure just about everyone can find fun in PvP and other things after they’ve got boss gear. Completing your gear set is just one less thing to worry about and lets you enjoy so many more things. The people advocating for “time clocks” and such want the gogogo mentality that drives retail, and that’s precisely what many of us are trying to get away from. I probably wouldn’t see content if I was on a time clock, without it I know I eventually will. Just give us our peaceful backwater already.
Vanilla was always changing, and a static game isn’t vanilla-like, it’s pserver-like. The wheel was always turning, no one got to stay on the top forever (talking to you, warriors!)
The people who have everything planned out for the optimum way to get to the most overpowered end-game, they want everything to stay exactly how it is forever, and they want everyone else stuck there with them (they talk about ‘not splitting the community’).
But you’re right, after we’ve all indulged our nostalgia for a couple of years, and things start to stagnate, something will have to change. And if enough people are playing Classic to make it worthwhile for Blizzard to keep them around - it will.
Though not my preferred option, I think we’ll at least get TBC. I’m sure anyone who wants to stay on Vanilla servers will be able to though, and we’ll survive a little bit of community splitting.
That’s just it, I think if Classic Vanilla is a success, we can expect more Classic expansions down the line. Ideally I’d be for one time character transfers if you want to skip out of vanilla or just keeping the two server types separate. In no way should anyone be forced to progress as that invalidates the “museum piece” concept, been there, done that. There will be some community splitting but I’d personally probably play both.
I just hope if Classic servers go ghost at some point they don’t mess around and just merge them. “Oh no mah names!” I’d get over it if it meant people to group with again, if it came to that.
Yes, this is exactly what I am looking for in Classic – a MMORPG where I don’t have to worry about next week’s patch nerfing or removing all kinds of existing game elements I enjoy.
Translation: If you don’t agree with me you should have no choice, classic WoW means getting your character deleted every 2 years.
Lol okay dude, or you could just not be so salty and roll an alt if you get bored. Either way, Classic will be a museum game because that’s what a majority of people here want, and all the high horse verbal gymnastics in the world won’t change that.
And if you want to get technical, Classic WoW only had one max level during its entire existence. The very concept of forced character resets is akin to a forced expansion, and by definition is not the vanilla experience, it is the death of it.
And it stops being a museum game immediately at the mark when TBC should have launched, because you’re giving people more time to progress than they can, or should ever have received.
Furthermore, you are ignoring the purpose of time gates being implemented into the game at all… Getting to experience the game again when everyone is leveling up and the pvp system is not yet in place IS PART OF THE MUSEUM… Your stagnation method is removing entire wings of this “museum” one by one as time goes forward without room to revisit them, and you are defending what can only turn into an ever increasingly top heavy gear, and economically inflated mess that in no way is authentic or representative of what vanilla actually was… You claim to want a “museum” and yet you are fighting passionately to make it anything but.
And you could stop being stupid enough to think that rolling an alt when naxx is already being farmed, and you can do things like have your guild carry you through Naxx bosses that have long since been on farm/ buy naxx level boes like Servo arm within an hour of level capping… is anything remotely resembling the experience of playing on a fresh realm, and working your way through the entirety of the progression again.
This is akin to Flying on the retail game… Blizzard has acknowledged that flying presents very significant game play problems, in that it mostly gets used to entirely skip world content whenever humanly possible. Players, when asked, will even largely admit, that flying ends up being a net harm to the game. They understand that it’s a QoL convenience, at the expense of overall game play (and in flying’s case, literally the “WORLD” part of “World of Warcraft”). Now what happens every time Blizzard tries to limit flying, or even takes it away TEMPORARILY for an expansion with pathfinder meta achievement? Oh right, those same people lose their stupid little minds over it.
The very same thing happened with water striders… Blizzard realized it was kind of a broken thing to allow 2 mounts to have a complete advantage over every other mount in the game, and even invalidate Death Knight and Shaman class abilities. When asked, the majority of players would even agree with that sentiment… So what happened when Blizzard tried to remove water striders? Those same stupid little people lost their minds all over again… to the point that Blizzard eventually caved and kept them in game… and are now even handing out water walking to everyone who wants it as an assignable mount perk next patch.
This is a near identical situation to you desperately trying to avoid NECESSARY resets. You are just like those people losing their mind over flying every expansion, and you just like are those people who are causing Retail to give everyone water walking mounts. You are so blinded by your own entitled sense of personal convenience, that you are willing to hurt the game itself in your desperate attempts to hold onto it. The only actual difference, is at least they’re defending something they’ve actually had during the game’s history, where as the stagnation you are fighting for (hilariously enough under the guise of authenticity) has NEVER ONCE EXISTED in this game’s entire history on either live realms, or private realms. Yet for some reason you, and your ilk, think not only that this dream of a stagnant wow realm, something that to this point has only ever existed in your warped little minds is somehow authentic, but that you are furthermore somehow entitled to it, and the massive changes it forces upon the game as a whole.
That’s a long rant to say “I don’t want to share my purples.”
And that’s 13 words (15 if you count contractions) to tell me that you’re illiterate.
Insulting me doesn’t make your motivations any less transparent.
My motivation is the longevity of the game as a whole, despite your moronic assertion.
What is your motivation for wanting a stagnant version of classic, when there’s literally no evidence to suggest that it can or does represent a viable model capable of long term success? Is it something beyond a pathetic sense of entitlement towards convenience, at the expense of game play? Thought not. Take that garbage to BfA where it belongs.
The game’s longevity is bigger and more important than your perceived entitlement to change the game. As I’ve already previously mentioned, resets don’t benefit me in any regard, beyond helping keep the game going longer term… Frankly I don’t particularly enjoy leveling, gearing, or raiding for the gear required to go blow things up in pvp… The difference between us is, I’m capable of looking past myself and making the necessary sacrifice for the game to be sustainable. You, clearly, are to self involved to say the same.
There are people that will eventually stop playing if they do not get resets or a fresh server. There are people that will stop playing if they are forced to reset. Having the occasional fresh server keeps both parties happy. Its a pretty obvious solution.
Your path seems to be forcing people that don’t want a static server to play on a static server. To your benefit. Plantation much?