This is going to be a bit verbose.
My opinion is that the Classic release/beta announcement has been handled in a poor manner. I’ll get right to the major issues:
1. The Streamer Involvement
I’m not sure if your social media/marketing people are aware, but there’s a non-nominal portion of the Classic Wow community that absolutely loathes streamers. For some people it’s likely a generational thing (they didn’t grow up with Twitch); for other people it’s personal. There are certain Twitch personalities that have publicly expressed negativity toward the revitalization of vanilla WoW and/or elements of the vanilla community. There are others that have either shared false Classic information or just come across as being untrustworthy opportunists. There’s yet a third group that has openly derided vanilla-WoW design philosophies because those principles don’t lend themselves to e-sports. These are some of the people we were receiving information from yesterday; these are the people that have (or likely will have) access to the beta.
To make things worse, on Monday and Tuesday a couple of these influencers thought it would be a good idea to hop on Twitter and Reddit to mock members of the Classic community (or react to people that were mocking them). Players and streamers were getting into petty spats, with the former expressing their dislike for the latter, and the latter flaunting their beta access to intentionally goad the former. Not exactly a positive environment surrounding the release announcement of your game. The fact that you made these Twitch personalities the custodians of the biggest Classic-related news yet – I just think the person that made this decision is incredibly out of touch. This information should have been released through official channels and not left to some Twitch streamers that the community is already hostile toward.
This game is (was?) guaranteed to have a tremendous Twitch presence anyway, and anyone paying attention knew that months ago. Some of the biggest names on that site have expressed interest in streaming Classic, as well as various Instagram personalities and even people who have done television/film. The idea that you need to “create” a Twitch presence for Classic by using B/C tier streamers that are going to get absolutely buried during release, I just don’t see the purpose. It’s like your social media team is trying to create work for themselves that doesn’t actually need to be done, and in the process they do more harm than good. I don’t believe retail expansion announcements are handled in the manner that we saw this week, so why do this with Classic Wow? Is this the way we are going to get Classic, TBC, and Wrath server information in the future? If yes, why?
2. The Layering Information Dissemination
This ties heavily into issue number 1. Why are we first receiving this information from people who aren’t game designers or network engineers? Skilled professionals are going to be the most adept at explaining a game system such as this, not some dude whose only tech bonafides are building a gaming PC and a Twitch channel. The whole sharding/phasing/layering topic has been one of the most contentious issues here for months, so you’d have to be a total dullard (or just not paying attention) to not see that the layering announcement is something that needed to be handled with finesse. Instead of controlling the narrative on this issue and providing information via official channels, you left it up to a group of people who don’t even fully understand how it works.
Why isn’t Ion Hazzikostas the face of Classic WoW? He has more verifiable vanilla WoW experience than 99.99% of the people here, and he should have been anointed as the (public) head authority on this project a long time ago. I understand he’s very busy, but he really should be the dominant voice here. I was the guild leader of Elitist Jerks; I’m a Scarab Lord; I did the math on unbeatable C’Thun; I’m the authority. Assert yourself and just straight up tell people that you understand the vanilla WoW experience as well as anyone else does, and you fully understand their concerns about the impact of new tech in Classic WoW. I see that Ion and Calia are now being wheeled out to attempt damage control on the layering thing; they should have been handling this information the entire time.
3. The Release Date
Yeah…this screwed a bunch of us hard, and it stings. I won’t directly address the bozos who can’t be bothered to look up easily verifiable facts regarding who is in school and who is not, but I will say that in the United States alone there are ~8-9 million college students age 25+, depending on the year (roughly 40-45% of all college students in the U.S., according to the National Center for Education Statistics). For students of any age, and educators, late August/ early September is obviously going to be a bad time to get lost in Azeroth again. That time of the year can also be busy for parents, with kids going back to school and the drama/schedule changes involved in that process. The retail sector is one of the biggest employers in America, and early September is when they and other companies start focusing on gearing up operations for the holiday months. Simply put, early September (+/- a week) starts to get really busy for millions upon millions of people.
Is one of the goals of Classic WoW to get people back who may have been out of your ecosystem for an extended period of time? Is releasing a time-demanding game when many people don’t have time to spare a good way to achieve that? Everyone knows that Classic requires a time commitment that many modern MMOs do not, and the people looking to get back into it are probably very aware of just how many hours it can chew up. Making a serious attempt to get back into vanilla WoW at the busiest point in the year is likely going to yield poor results (either in game progress, or in aspects of your real life, or both). There are only so many hours in the day, and if I have extremely limited free time, I’m much more likely to hop on Path of Exile or Borderlands 3, or whatever. There are thousands of games out there where I can accomplish tasks if I only have 30 minutes to play; Classic WoW is not one of them.
I understand that Classic needs some more time in the proverbial oven, but I can’t help but feel like the Classic release date is scheduled around patch 8.2. Retail patch 8.2 is releasing at some point near the beginning of the summer, and it’s my belief that Activision-Blizzard doesn’t wan’t 8.2 and Classic to compete with each other. That’s fine, and completely understandable, but you’re making a conscious decision to negatively impact (many) Classic players so that you can separate 8.2 and Classic. I hope 8.2 brings as many players back for you as Classic likely will. I understand that retail is more profitable, but when your monthly active users are vanishing like smoke, I would have thought that getting as many users back as possible would be a priority. I guess that’s why I don’t make the big bucks.
Anyway, if you’ve read this far, you’re a trooper, and I wish you all joy in your less than one third of a Classic summer.