Exactly. Also don’t be surprised if a large contingent of players are in the “I only play for 3 to 4 hours a week” crowd as well.
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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.
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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.
Eh, not entirely true, there were drop offs in player population between content patches even in Vanilla. They just weren’t particularly evident because the over-all population was growing while all of that was going on. Also most of those players, while they may have stopped playing, or simply curtailed their time in game, remained subscribed. But then, the only people who would have been likely to notice those population declines were “the power gamers” as they were the only ones who had essentially “beat the game” for whatever level they chose to play at for the time.
Different games appeal to different people. Most of us here probably agree that Classic is better than Retail, but retail, FF14, and ESO all share common design philosophies and are 3 of the most popular MMOs on the market. Vanilla pservers on the other hand have been available for free for a long time and only have around 200k active players.
The main reason we are bracing for massive attrition is due to the fact that the 2-4 million retail players are getting free access to Classic.
LOVE that font.
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For you it was. If the community was so strong prior to it like it was claimed, a community could have easily weather than storm. My community was great, took a little hit but remained strong. It didn’t destroy server communities, it destroyed people play experience. or rather your experience, and the minorities experience.
BUT it answered the age long old question that was even in vanilla, and in BC.
“it’s my 15 dollars too per month, why can’t I at least experience the raid just because I’m disabled/mother/father/school/work/etc” which was a healthy compromise. It allowed everyone to experience content at a reduced difficulty and reduced reward. The ballers in the heroic gear were still brawlers, but you slept good at night after ventrillo talking about cool that airship fight was with you casual friends or just a couple people that you knew but couldn’t make a raid/group.
EDIT: Sorry I talked about the LFR aspect, but the LFG aspect is still cloth. Ballers didn’t care about running through 5 mans (unless they were heroic/mythic) or those strong in the community or high end raiders didn’t. All it affected was just the poor schmuck trying to make ends meet to justify his 15 bucks a month and keep him attracted to the game. It affected nobody else.
Like I said if your community is/was strong, it shouldn’t have had any problem… Unless you were the problem to begin with.
To be fair here, Vanilla was losing massive amounts of people… it was just overshadowed by the fact that even more massive amounts of people came in new each quarter, so it showed as a net gain.
Classic should lose smaller numbers of people, but should also not be getting those massive amounts of new players either… it’s likely to result in pretty good losses after the new car smell wears off.
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No it wasn’t, past populations graphs proved it remained popular and continue to gain popularity, population, and traction wellllll after vanilla and into other expansions. Look it up for yourself my dud
Here’s a tin foil conspiracy for ya.
What if they’re urging people to move around because they can’t justify opening up more servers because the amount of “new” people (versus already subbed) wasn’t enough to pay the bills for upkeep? What if there was barely anybody coming back and all it is is just people who are already subbed to the game which doesn’t factor into “classics” profits?
Eeeeehhhhhh?
The graphs only show the net gains. If you lose 300,000 players in a quarter but gain 400,000 new players… it looks like everyone loves your game (because you gained 100 thousand). But it’s not true if you lost 300,000 people.
There are some old articles out there that reference WoWs “churn” numbers… the losses were pretty massive.
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Sounds to me like you just gained 100,000 new players, if by your logic. And gained 100,000 people.
I too remember when I quit for a quarter or two only to come back 3-7 times in WoW’s history.
I was already well on my way out the door when LFG hit. It was a slow death to the server community from my understanding of things from there, based on what happened with my guild at the time. It wasn’t an overnight community killer, it took Cataclysm before it started to really have an impact to my understanding, but an impact it did have.
Not going to dispute that it was intended to help low population realms in particular, and to provide “opportunities” for newer players to be guided/mentored by more experienced players as well as simply allowing them to get into that content in the first place.
But it was that very same “help low population realms, by allowing them to form groups with high population realms” which started the death by a thousand cuts for those higher population realms. Because it wasn’t a one-way thing, it also caused high population realms to form groups with other high population realms. Which is where the slow destruction of the community began to take place.
You became “just another face in the crowd” and so did those people you grouped with.
Gaining and keeping are very different things. Gaining is more the responsibility of marketing and hype… while keeping is more influenced by the experience (gameplay).
Classic will not lose such staggering numbers, because more people have an idea what they are getting into.
But by the same token, Classic will not be gaining new players at such a staggering rate either. After the initial surge (probably a few months), Classic will decline like anything else, the only real question is how fast.
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