Title. Seems like huge drop off as phases progress.
3 Likes
My personal opinion, was once you completed everything on your main and are in the raiding rotation, you basically played only during that rotation. Alts to me are not convenient to level with all the runes and reps to grind. Account-wide rep probably could have helped, and a rune vendor of some sort beyond the 4-7 runes you can buy now. I still think SoD is the most enjoyable of all the classics.
16 Likes
a lot of arguably anti classic implementations from the start
lack of transparency.
personally I had a really big issue with the 2h vs dw enhancement shaman thing.
- before launch: ‘we have no plans to implement 2h’
- right before launch: ‘haha j-just a prank! just made a new rune’
- launch: rune not in game
- phase 2: rune finally in game, but from max level quest + dw disproportionately buffed to the moon shortly afterwards
- phase 4: finally implemented very simple/obvious changes that made 2h do comparable dmg
I haven’t bothered to compare/contrast them in phase 6, but the point is that some of us wasted time/money on a wow sub because we wanted to believe they actually cared. I feel like there were a lot of obvious issues like this that they kept sweeping under the rug for some reason.
It also seems like they made an assumption that people wouldn’t care about PvP. I can’t see the numbers they base their decisions off, but it at least seems like it does matter. They’ve made a lot of very questionable decisions, especially regarding tanking builds. WoE for example was a disaster for multiple phases. People are still complaining about it. Maybe some of you weren’t around for WoD, but they tried to make tanking specs viable in pvp at the start of that expansion and it was a disaster then too.
Also P3 was an absolute mess. Funny to think about them prioritizing Cata.
A couple of other noteworthy occurrences:
At the start of SoD, they silently implemented damage mitigation in battlegrounds and hoped no one would notice.
Suddenly making items that took hours of farming to acquire unique, so the second one would suddenly disappear from your bag, etc.
These are all the things that spring to the front of my mind, but beyond this, there were a lot of nasty surprises. I heard they were planning for this for years beforehand in the background (?), but it doesn’t seem like it.
6 Likes
It sounds like all of your complaints are PvP-related and no offense but SoD was not meant to be balanced for PvP.
The majority of the community that want Classic+ are PvE players because WoW is just not a popular or even balanced PvP game. It never has outside of certain retail patches.
SoD has problems but the majority that aren’t playing quit because they had unrealistic expectations of SoD or got burnt out of playing Classic.
I think a lot of people like the idea of playing Classic until the actually get down to the fact that the game just doesn’t have good content at 60 and doesn’t have the daily grinds like retail has.
If you’re like me and just wanted to experience Classic as someone who didn’t play in 2019, but you want better classes and items with some general QoL, I think SoD was successful for us.
3 Likes
I did include a giant paragraph about pvp, but no. Not all of my complaints are pvp related. I subbed for months because they said 2h enhance would be in the game. A lot of people were disappointed because they said it would be in the game. They eventually put it in the game to shut us up, but it was completely useless in both pve and pvp.
A lot of people on these forums like to assume they know what ‘the majority’ want. I’ve even read people using terms like ‘the greater good’. It would be arrogant of you to assume.
I’m sorry but putting down an entire project like SoD because it didn’t fulfill your specific nichè sub-class fantasy is quite strange.
They had to manage MANY classes, specializations and runes. If you think 2H Shamans were left short, you should listen to the melee hunters. Didn’t stop me from enjoying the game just because I wasn’t the top spec.
FYI: I don’t think any Shamans should be complaining. You were given arguably more love than any other class, short of Ret Paladins.
3 Likes
I made the mistake of rambling on about issues that I personally care about. My intention when I first started writing that post was to give examples of lack of transparency.
People who care about PVE have their own complaints. Buried underneath all of my personal complaints there was a mention of P3. Did you think P3 went down smoothly?
This idea that someone doesn’t have the right to complain because they play a stronger class is absurd. I didn’t enjoy playing a weird overpowerd version of WoTLK enhance. Consider growing up.
1 Like
Blizzard did not allocate enough resources to the Classic Development Team to keep up a suitable pace of content and balancing.
The dropoff from Phase 1 to Phase 2 is expected. They banned GDKPs before Phase 2, which drove away that community. Also, the time commitment to level to 40 is much greater than leveling to 25, so people who had 6-7 alts raiding in Phase 1 dialed it down to 1-3 in Phase 2.
But the real dropoff came when the Classic Dev Team needed all hands on deck for the launch of Cataclysm Classic, and they decided to stall Phase 4 and make Phase 3 last twice as long as Phase 1 and 2.
It didn’t help that Phase 3 was already the worst Phase yet, or that Phase 4 was the most anticipated Phase of all, being the Level 60 Phase.
Even with them effectively killing SoD with that move though, the population had bounced back and held steady at around 70-80k players throughout Phase 4, Phase 5, and going into Phase 6. So that’s nice at least.
EDIT: They also went into SoD talking big about a focus on wpvp events and then fell off massively as time went on. We got unique WPvP events and rewards in Phase 1 and 2, but Phase 3 just recycled the Phase 2 event with less meaningful unique rewards and both Phase 4 and 5 gave us a mountain with extra honor but zero unique pvp rewards.
I know that I and everyone else I played with came into SoD excited for the wpvp focus, only to be disappointed more and more as time went on.
7 Likes
Yeah, basically this. SoD/Classic in general does not really generate much revenue. Pennies on the dollar compared to retail.
Unless they start monetizing classic, you can’t realistically expect similar content cadence. Instead of blaming the team for their mistakes, understand that they had to manage both Cataclysm and SoD launches very close together while being understaffed and budgeted.
All things considered, I wouldn’t consider SoD dead or a failure. If you actually logon you can see for yourself that there are plenty of people in the city and posting groups.
It was an experiment obviously that was a constant work in progress. I throughly enjoyed my time playing SoD, I wouldn’t have gotten back into Classic otherwise.
1 Like
Yes, the consolidation into mega-servers will keep the game feeling lively for those playing it all the way through Phase 7 imo. I might not stick around after hitting Rank 14, but should be fine all the way to the end of the Season.
Did they have to? Lets not pretend we understand whats happening inside of blizzard, or how much profit they get from classic subs.
We don’t have to pretend lol, Blizzard has been plenty public about how much of their money comes from the shop and how much comes from subs. They make money hand over fist from selling wow tokens and mounts on Cata and everything under the sun on Retail. Just have to check their quarterly earnings reports.
SoD and indeed every version of Classic including the new Anniversary Realms is a veritable rounding error on their books.
2 Likes
They didn’t have to do Cataclysm, no. They also didn’t have to do Wrath or TBC but there as enough interest and people tend for forget that Classic != vanilla.
The moment they announced TBC, it became a community for all players that enjoy older versions of WoW. Looking at the Classic Era numbers before fresh vs. Cataclysm tells Blizzard that there’s a market for post-Wrath expansions.
Btw, we don’t really have to guess to understand that Classic isn’t profitable. We know how many people are playing Classic, Blizzard has the metrics of how many accounts subscribed have no time played in retail + the lack of in-game store items.
There’s a reason why the Classic team has been understaffed & underfunded. The quality of launches and lack of timely bug-fixes reflect that.
I’m with you on this btw. I’m happy with what we got out of SoD. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but will I play a more permanent classic+ if they bring one out in a few years that’s heavily inspired by SoD? In a heart beat.
3 Likes
Likely not an exaggeration, I would wager that the most recent Auction House mount they sold in retail has made more money than Classic has since it launched.
I feel like they would have to justify it internally somehow.
I’m sure they make a profit. But they probably wouldn’t make a profit if they dedicated more resources than they already are to the Classic Dev Team. That’s how they justify it, by keeping the Classic Dev Team overworked and underfunded.
I’ll put it this way, why do you think there are items in SoD that also exist in the retail anniversary patch as cosmetics? Like the purple scythe.
SoD and Cata hooked me back into WoW, it got me playing again. Classic gets boring after a while and they knew it would bring people back to retail.
This is also a possible explanation. Classic might be a loss leader for them at this point. Like how Costco sells their rotisserie chickens at a loss, but they keep doing it because it makes people buy other stuff in their store every time they visit.
There’s a difference between developing SoD and a proper WoW Classic 2.0. We are talking dozens of new staff, lore writers, artists, voice-actors, developers etc.
Developing new content for the oldest, most archaic version of the game requires very special talent and collaboration from people in the private server space. People that have been modding old wow for over a decade.
Recycling old WoW content was something they could achieve with what they had to work with.