There’s no believing here. The world after the Shattering is not the same. And one of my reasons for not ever playing Cata again.
Well true there were physical changes. Darkshore has cities that are now in ruins, the Stonewrought Dam in Loch Modan was smashed and there were those kinds of changes. I guess that was about the point where hunters no longer had to feed their pets and you no longer had to find class trainers to get the next ability.
Is that what you are pointing out?
All of these and a heap more, yes. It was also when linearity and hand holding Quests arrived, when Spells and ablities bcame locked behind specs, and so many more changes to gameplay that it’s almost not the same game.
replying to a random post to update WCL enjoy the bump
Funny thing is, Wrath seems to be somewhere in the middle. Wrath feels like a big change from Classic vanillia in that you can grab a lot of quests, look at the map and decide which area you want to clear next.
In Classic Vanilla you have no idea where the quests are are unless you remember from having done it before. Again it’s a whole different game but that change didn’t seem to bother people much.
I still think the man drop off after Cat had to do with Facebook coming out and starting the Social Media craze which people prefered over MMOs.
I don’t really think that’s a huge factor. Sure, for some people it was. But I really think the revamp, store mounts, and heading into pandas drove more people away.
That’s one of many claims people have made as to why people left. I have a list I sometimes post of about 20 or 30 things that people are convinced are THE THING that drove people away.
For example here are two of them:
- Borrowed power: We get new features that are taken away.
- Buttom Bloat: We get new features and we are stuck with them.
I see some people claiming the first one drove people away and some people claiming the second one drove people way. The only thing they agree on is that it’s all the “devs” fault.
Also wotlk was pretty easy to gear up in heroics. Cata heroics were a lot more difficult so that may have driven off people who wanted to play a chill game.
I think everyone has their own reason why they quit, but I think there’s some major pain points people agree on. I know borrowed power really burnt me out on retail.
I agree, and take the borrowed power / buttom bloat example.
Both are real, both caused anger and complaints but clearly one side has done a much better job than the other at making their case in the forums.
I think it’s no coincidence that the button bloat people are the ones that see arguing in the forums as another job they would rather not do which makes the borrowed power side seem more representative of “the community”.
In Wrath you could (can?) still not show thaose markers. But I agree partly that the game had already changed. It bothered me, but the basic things were still the same, according to me.
I do not in any way want to discuss the decline in players in OG Cata, because I think it has no bearing whatsoever on whether to launch or play Cata again or not.
People run private TBC servers for free. I don’t think it would cost Blizzard one salaried employees to spin up a server instance of TBC. It’d literally be less work than they spent on spinning up hardcore servers, which is probably MORE niche than TBC fans.
I’m leveling a 'toon now in Wrath and you can see those markers. If you take a bunch of quests then click on the little button in the upper right just under where you click in retail you see a map with all the quest locations.
As for Cata, you probably have a point. Hard to think of it as “classic”.
How about…no?
Thing is, if you have a server for every expansion then the next question, will people want a server for each season (or point release) of each expansion.
That’s spreading the population pretty thin.
I have no idea where to click, as I do not play Retail. I do not play Wrath very much either - actually mostly HC, I’m almost 60 (YAY) - but I remember a setting in Wrath, vhere you coudl choose to not show all those markers on your map. I could be wrong, and it could be removed - or only have been there in earlier patches. I never liked Quest helpers and always turned off as much as possible.
Noone ever asked for this. We ask for 2 ervers for each of the 3 classics - Era, BC and Wrath.
And still I’d take the ‘spreading the population pretty thin’-solutions over not being able to play at all.
Well they could rotate them. That’s what streaming services like Netflix do, they run a movie on demand, when demand gets low they “retire” it, then years later they bring it back for another run.
That seems to be what the are doing with old “classic” versions.
Stupid suggestion! I want to keep my characters!
All the demands add up. People want all the expansions and they continually want new servers with each expansion. Question is, who is going to pay for all of this?
I would gladly pay for Era servers. And I’m quite sure I’m not alone - already I pay for Retail, that I do not use - why not pay for something that I actually would use instead.
But Blizz dare not split up the sub, I’m aftraid.
Each level would become it’s own game instead of being versions of one game so that would probably mean multiple subs for anyone that wanted to play all of them.
Question is, would each sub, (era(1-n), tbc(1-n), wrath(1-n) have enough players to support their server?