Queues. First of all, the chances of a 15 year old game that has been available for free through pservers being able to reverse a decade long decline in MMOs and surpass retail is very unlikley. The main 3 pservers have less than 200k active players, retail has 2-4 million.
But I’ll play out your fantasy. Layering is gone by phase 2, that is happening even if servers are still peaking at 20k. The immediate result would be 17k players in queue. Blizzard would just open new servers and offer transfers off of the full servers to these new servers. It really is that easy.
The “Average player” should take about 3 months to hit level 60.
Unless they no life it, or min/max their way to 60. Which probably won’t be the “average player” but a substantial number of people all the same.
Dire Maul and the PvP honor system went live about the same time the “average player” was hitting level 60. At least for North America. Patch 1.3(Dire Maul and the World Dragons) released on March 5th, compared to a November 23rd release. That’s over a three month spread. I think a November release for Phase 2 to go with an August 27th release is reasonable. I also think that’ll probably be about right for Classic’s “Average Player.”
The power gamers will simply have to rage for most of September and all of October.
But nobody really knows. Your guess is as good as Blizzard’s guess is as good as mine.
But I seriously doubt it will be 95%. I’d be willing to bet a lot on that. This game is just too good and too well-designed and too addictive. There was a very good reason that it was so successful back then, and most of the “improvements” have made the game worse, not better.
One thing to remember: even if there were absolutely no drop in the number of active players, we would still expect to see a large drop in the number of players logging in at the same time over the course of weeks.
Think about it: a ton of people are planning to take time off the first week, even no-lifing for a while. They certainly aren’t going to do that every week though. Life can’t be put off forever.
Eventually, they’re going to go from (for example) ten hours per day to eight, six, five and four… Until a couple months down the road, they’re playing for perhaps 10-20 hours a week.
And when you go from playing say 60 hours per week to 10-20 across the player base, you get an effective 66% to 80% drop even if the player base remains the exact same.
Not at all considering the vast majority of the playerbase isn’t new people, it’s people who already have had a sub for countless ages, like myself. I’ll play Classic to the end, or at least as far as I can go, but thats not going to stop me from enjoying the updates and expansions from retail and new raids and content and story.
My sub is for both, you wont see a decline in numbers, you’ll just see less people there on average. And yeah I’m pretty confident the drop off will be as such. Especially if they dont time retail and phase because i’m going to chose to raid next level content over a diremaul patch or wsg or whatever any day.
Agreed. I think 70% is probably going to be a good estimate for the initial crush of players. It’s probably going to be lower than that all considered, but as a conservative estimate it has a strong grounding in historical precedent. As such, 95% is way too high.
The reason why 70% is likely to potentially be excessive is that a LOT of the people coming in to play Classic WoW played WoW extensively at some point in the past, as opposed to the “unwashed masses” that were logging into the game during Wrath(or earlier) to see “what the fuss was about.”
I think a number of apathetic Retail Players are going to find Classic oddly addictive even for them, but a lot of them will be able to set it aside regardless.
I don’t think there is going to be much(comparatively speaking) in the way of people coming from “outside” to participate in the initial crush of players, so it will be interesting to watch play out. Plenty of variables in play on this, and not much to compare it to.
I do think a lot of the people who will return to check out Classic “don’t have the time” to invest in it like they did back in the day. So while it’s possible they’ll “binge” for a bit, their activity is going to also drop like a rock as well after that initial binge. They may come back periodically to play some more, but they’re not going to be playing on any kind of schedule. Giving an effective if not actual sharp decline in population in the aftermath of launch.
I think it’s entirely possible that for the first week after launch that Classic is going to be well ahead of retail before things settle down again. Classic may eventually overtake Retail once more, but its going to probably be at least a couple months before it happens again.
Improvements and balance and difficulty that the community saw fit to need to want. the vast majority. and was absolutely well recieved by the vast majority all the way past WOTLK which then it started to taper and fall.
WoW continued to be absolutely successful past vanilla. Remember well
Most “average” WoW players won’t be playing classic very much three months after launch. I figure the key #'s will be concurrent players for server load and minimum threshold pop levels for ‘health’ realms in a single realm world.
You actually quoted me quoting Kerg on that. Not that I disgree with his sentiment on some of that.
There are changes that have been made to retail over the years that have improved the game, yes even the QOL items. Several other changes are rather neutral in my book(Battle Pets for example).
But other changes were cancer to the community at large or the over-all gameplay. Flying was a great idea in theory, but as it was implemented, it hurt the game, particularly on pvp realms.
LFG was great in theory, but in reality it destroyed the need for communities, and then cascaded into a number of other changes as well.
Can’t really speak to LFR, as it was after my time, but as I understand how it works, it wasn’t exactly a great “community enhancement” as in most respects, it more of acknowledgement from Blizzard that they’d already killed it with LFG.
I disagree on this. The “Average player” will probably still be playing Classic quite happily 3 to 4 months from now, as “the Average player” isn’t likely to be overly focused on playing Classic for the raids, or even the PvP content.
The one who will likely be minimizing their playtime around then are going to be a lot of the “power gamers” who are going to be on these forums screaming and yelling at Blizzard demanding that Blizzard push out the next content phase.
If populations stay there more than a week in, I’d be surprised, but let’s just suppose they do:
Blizzard will create new servers, and possibly allow free transfers to even things out.
High populations are not a BAD thing though. In Vanilla, people used to complain when their servers felt too EMPTY. That’s part of the reason we ended up with sister servers and sharding technology.
I can’t agree to anything said because I’ve benifited from the QoL and changes so much it’ll pale anyone else dissatisfaction when comparing. in game, out of game, and social aspects and every other aspect as a matter of fact (from personal experience)
but thats why vanilla moved forward into the way it is. And it’s already been debated on whether or not it was good or bad but the reality is a vast majority benefited from it while the other side just simply got bitter about it.
But regardless, it moved forward because of the community of old and the 15 year old multi-thousand thread forum posts and debates and balances and nerfs and buffs, it all moved forward because of the very same community that was there at the beginning and wanted to see the game success away from what vanilla was.
WoW’s historical precedent of a mass exodus within a few months after the release of new content really didn’t start until WoD, and then the pattern repeated in Legion and BFA. But that didn’t happen in vanilla or TBC or Wrath. The numbers steadily increased after release. There was no exodus.
I’m not saying there won’t be a dropoff. There will be. Many BFA players will dabble in it, with no intention of sticking around, because it’s free to them. But if Blizzard is using WoD - BFA patterns as a historical predictor, I don’t think that it is a good one. I think because of the community, Classic is a much more addictive game and much more difficult to leave on a whim once you get entrenched in a guild.
It’s going to be interesting to see how it plays out.
LFG was a poor implementation. They went with an option that destroyed server communities rather than enhancing them. Largely due their cross-realm nature. As it completely did away with the need to worry about your reputation in groups. By that one decision, they turned something that could have been a huge social networking and guild recruitment tool into a community killer instead. The teleport to the dungeon that it committed them to didn’t help things much further either, as it stuck another proverbial knife into world-PvP which was already critically wounded because of flying mounts.
The eventual arrival of cross-realm sharding just turned it into even more of a farce for most realms.
If classic is truely static you could see people very slowly building a toon over years.
Just because they registered a name, and then leave it alone, don’t mean they won’t have a stab at it every now and then.
The release schedule works against this long game. With FOMO, player power and the traditional iteration of the raid cycle; release-clear repeat, forcing interested parties to at least try.