Nah, most players have specific features they would like from retail, many of which were introduced in TBC/Wrath like dual spec. But there are not droves of players asking for WoD or BFA as is/was.
That doesn’t say much for blizzard’s ability to actually pull off a successful classic+ given that retail has been less and less popular. Largely because blizzard has been ignoring feedback from players and doubling down on their worst ideas.
Y sorry i meant servers that will bridge your Classic characters to TBC.
I’d like to see TBC fresh level 1 as another drop down game and classic staying as is with possibility of fresh classic servers.
htt ps://secure.runescape.com/m=news/gielinor-gazette-july-2020?oldschool=1#_ga=2.67370129.1653654964.1595976127-1344428980.1595593805
This is the Gielinor Gazette, the main form of communication between developers and players in Old School Runescape. Every month we get to know what the developers are thinking, what they think needs improving, what is working well and what could be added without hurting the rest of the game.
Then we discuss things on the forums, and depending on how the reception goes and what the playerbase suggests the proposed changes get polled immediately (in order not to waste dev time in case of a failure), later with changes, or the idea is scrapped altogether.
But that’s not the only thing they tell us. They tell us what each developer is working on, along with state of completion and estimated time of arrival. They tell us who has been hired, and for what, and who has quit, and why.
Everywhere it is clear how much the OSRS team cares about the game and how much they respect the design principles that made the game what it was in the first place.
Can Classic WoW do that? If not, then an OSRS-style evolution wouldn’t work. Tell me the name of one person in the Classic WoW team and what they are currently working on. You can’t, can you? That kind of thing requires effort and an active community aware of what is actually good for the game. That last part is particularly important, and, to be completely honest, I don’t see it in the Classic WoW community. Old School Runescape players would understand that the lack of things like flight paths everywhere, transmog and low cooldown hearthstones, despite being annoying individually, are actually good for the game when together. A theoretical “Classic+” shouldn’t be a bizarre amalgamation of Vanilla and Retail, it should be CLASSIC, just MORE OF IT. I keep seeing people ask for things like transmog and flying, because they don’t want more (more difficult?) things that feel like Classic, they want Classic to feel more like retail. A transmog equivalent in Old School Runescape would be destroyed in the polls, I’m talking 85% disapproval AT LEAST.
So… Yeah, Classic+ will just turn into retail.
WoW hasn’t had anywhere close to that kind of transparency and interaction between the devs/CM’s and the community since the class revamps in vanilla. And certainly not after tseric had his epic meltdown.
And that’s one of the big problems with retail right now, the devs just do whatever they want. Then keep doing it in the face of negative responses from the community.
I do think that you would be surprised about how an honest in game poll about things like flying, transmog, dual spec would actually turn out though. Things like ability pruning, massive time gating though, yeah those would be turned down real quick.
I feel like Classic has already started to converge on Retail with Cross-Realm BGs and Transfers.
But, I don’t think there’s any real argument against having each expansion available to play through. I’d like to see an upgrade path, so one could take a character to max-level in each iteration, and play its end game, prior to upgrading to the next tier of content.
Sure but there will be some percentage of players in every expansion that want to stop there. Leading to Blizzard eventually supporting 4, 5 or more different “Classic” variants of the game.
Because of that, while Wrath is a likely milestone for them to hit (revisiting the height of WoW’s popularity and its most iconic villain) - redoing anything after that is less certain.
It really depends on what’s meant by support. If people are playing though, then it’s probably worth it. Heck, Diablo II doesn’t run on a subscription model, but still has servers running (and people playing).
Well, just look at Classic today - there are still exploits continually being discovered and botting strategies being fixed, like the latest fix being looked at regarding botters bracket-stuffing, and of course waves of bans that are needed. Now imagine them having to do that not just for Vanilla Classic, but also TBC, Wrath, Cata, MoP and WoD. Or worse, they don’t do that, and these exploits run rampant.
Diablo 2 isn’t a great example because they do very little to police that game, so things like dupe runes, hacked charms and occy rings are all over the place.
WoD in particular would be a bad idea - Garrisons throughout most of WoD’s life became massive money printers (compounded by the fact that most people had nothing better to do) leading to an inflation in retail that is still being compensated for to this day with the birth of the token and massive goldsinks like the longboi.
Sure, I can understand that, but it really depends on a couple of things:
It’s an excellent example. The game isn’t even subscription based, yet they still have servers running and people playing. It also has an upgrade path from pre-expansion to expansion.
All of the expansions being available to play through separately is something I personally think would be a good idea.
F R E S H pls
Subscriptions are just one piece of the puzzle - the servers for each expansion have to be at a critical mass to feel populated/not dead as well.
Ultimately it’s up to them but I would be very surprised if we get Cata Classic at all, much less anything beyond.
It’s really not for the reasons I described. Blizzard can get away with letting blatant exploits slide in a semi-offline game like Diablo 2, but in WoW that level of degeneracy would annihilate the economy.
Got it, we can agree to disagree.
Yeah, we’ll see how it goes. They have made a lot of changes to leveling, and experiencing content with Shadowlands. It will be interesting to see what does end up happening.
And it is for the reasons I described. We don’t have to agree on subjective things.
Agreed.
When I first put serious time into WoW, the Burning Crusade expansion had already been released. I thought I would be able to play through the original (Vanilla) content to experience the game at max level, before deciding if I wanted to proceed into the expansion zones.
I was actually pretty disappointed with the way they force the changes that come with the expac across all accounts, and effectively make the old content obsolete. I’ve personally always wished there were ways to stay in one iteration of the game to experience its end-game.
Indeed, if they end up releasing a BC Classic, how they decide to do so may be very telling for what is in store for potential future Classic releases.
Eh, I still don’t view “Diablo 2 is not an MMO and so the level of expected support to maintain its gameplay integrity is much lower than that of WoW” to be “subjective.” But I’ll leave it there.
Fair enough.
The thing is D2 is entirely separate thing, it’s not part of modern bnet like WoW classic is. It doesn’t get anywhere near the customer support classic does(which is pretty good despite how much some people whine). It’s not getting active patches, it just kind of sits there.
Which is what will eventually happen for WoW Classic, and any other Classic expansion.
D2 also does not have a recurring monthly subscription fee.
As long as classic and any expansions that get rereleased exist in the modern bnet architecture they will inherently require more support than D2 because they can’t just sit there.
And yes as you noted that they are charging money for WoW also means that it requires more support.
1 would be really cool. It would be neat to see the content that was scrapped
Classic + will never happen. People like to say its because they just are incompetent & cant recreate a vanilla-like expansion, but it has way more to do with the fact that they could simply re-open TBC and collect just as much money with virtually no effort. It’s obvious which option they’re going to choose.