Uhm, yeah, they have. Just a quick google search shows that Darrowshire and Anathema merged into Lightbringer. Never played it, but there is a post on Kronos about a server merge. I forget the name of the first pserver I played on, but it merged. The last time I logged on to a pserver all of my characters had been merged to a single realm (had to change names and now have multiple of same class on same server) So they absolutely have merged servers.
I will agree fresh start servers lead to decline, however you can see pservers decline before fresh starts are even announced.
That is very wishful thinking. Once I am able to clear Naxx, maybe gear a few alts through it, I am going to get bored and be ready to start over. And I mean completely start over. Progression is a big thing that keeps me and many others going. Once the game is “beat”, it starts to get boring. After about 2-2.5 years I’m going to be ready to start over, probably do it again from the Horde side.
They don’t need to go overboard with fresh starts, but they are going to need them.
That won’t be till at least CP6, which if they hold true to a 2 year timeline, won’t be for 20 months after launch. Then after you’re done progressing, you’ll get bored and reduce gameplay time. By year 3 when they see too few people playing, they’ll consider merges.
My timeline meets yours.
I very much doubt they’re going to do that. If they need fresh servers then they’re probably already developing their new WoW 2 MMO based on Classic principles. Classic is meant to be a museum piece not a permanently fresh MMO.
The fact that they are doing phases tells me that their idea of a museum piece is the experience. Also, the fact that they are calling it a museum piece tells me that they intend to run it more than a few years. Lastly, Blizzard is a company, one that answers to stock holders. Periodic fresh starts (I’m talking every few years, not every few months) will bring in revenue, jand at the end of the day that is the main goal of a publicly traded company.
They also said they don’t care if only 10 people end up playing it. They want it to be there for people to experience whenever they want to come back. That to me says they’re not going to delete old servers, and keeping old servers alive while making endless new ones is more of a cost than just leaving the old servers alive.
It also says that you can come band and experience it any time. The progression is part of the experience so it’s likely we will be getting fresh servers occasionally. You get both by merging dead/dying realms and using the recovered resources to launch fresh ones. The other option would be to enable CRZ on those realms and we all know how much the community loves CRZ.
The progression was a concession to all the eager fans. Everything they’ve said says they have “no plans” for what happens afterwards whether its fresh servers, TBC or Classic+.
I don’t think it’s a concession at all. I think they saw how all the private servers and other MMOs like EQ were keeping their players engaged and realized it’s the most feasible way to keep classic profitable in the long term…
And yes they have plans just not ones they are ready to commit to at this time. Saying “We have no future plans at this time.” is PR speak for “We want to see if this pans out how we expect before we say anything about things we have talked about internally.”.
Pesupistions abound. It wasn’t an issue during vanilla. If it was such a huge issue, vanilla wouldn’t have become a landmark success. Give us an unadulterated experice, NO SHARDING.
Its also not 2004. By that logic we can’t have Classic at all.
Get down off your ivory tower and look at Classic as a game longer than the first day you play. You won’t even notice the sharding once you get past it.
y’all are also assuming everyone that played vanilla WANTS to go back and play it again from the opening of the gates. i, for one, have no intentions of playing that rat race again…
Personally I like Nixxiom’s theory. People will definitely come back to it more especially during content droughts. Plus since we literally know the content release schedules for everything this time it will be possible for people to manage their progression accordingly.