That sounds about right.
Respeccing and alting was hard. And there wasn’t a ready pool of replacement players available like there was in retail.
This meant that raids that wanted to progress tended to take optimal classes and specs. So you took things like 6 holy paladins and 6 resto druids.
The system discouraged playing weird offspecs. They made it harder for the group to progress as a whole.
Raiding not being mythic difficulty will be a good thing, even mythic raiders screw up all the plate spinning some fights have pretty consistently.
Its hard enough to get players to move out of the fire and dispel one thing, I don’t want to take 40 vanilla players into a fight like Zek’voz, were every ability gets to overlap with each other one once and if one player messes up you call the wipe.
The difficulty gets transfered from raw fight mechanics to the logistics of farming consumables for a 40 player raid and scheduling a viable group, a different kind of hard to be sure, and classic reintroduces mechanics like threat, which you havent had to account for outside the pull for a minute.
This is what a lot of people don’t grasp.
It isn’t “low attention spans”, it’s numerous other options out there to play if Classic is even the slightest bit boring to a person.
people had lives and jobs in 2006
Not many games “outshine” classic WoW, most games copied later versions of world of warcraft and people dislike them. There is a reason people are claiming that “MMORPGs” are dying. This is a chance to re-energize the genera and change the direction of all these companies that keep going down the wrong road.
I like guys like you because you never get point of what we are saying. At a certain point you are a big deal. Especially by end of van at NAXX or mid TBC.
1.) Private servers were free, Classic charges $15 dollars a month. Apples and oranges.
2.) People will enjoy it until they run out of content. Then they will either roll alts or roll out.
3.) Judging by the few number of servers, I’d say it will have a fine niche audience for a period of time. Then Blizz will create TBC servers and MANY will switch over to that.
Either way, the number WILL drop. It is inevitable.
drop off or no drop off, i plan to play classic through naxx and probably beyond. it’s not just the content, but how you interact with the content and the other players…that’s what sells me. see you all on whitemane 
Because some people have realistic expectations.
Actually, most of the game mechanics in Retail are based off of vanilla mechanics and boss fights.
You are over simplifying it, just how blizzard over simplified their game.
As for the population, if you think Vanilla won’t grow in popularity you’re incredibly naive.
I disagree with you on the TBC point.
TBC was arguably the beginning of the down fall of WoW, and while it was the FIRST game for many, I think many people who played TBC will realize that TBC was actually a down grade from Vanilla and learn to love it more.
“If it’s not vanilla, it’s crap” is not an argument worth getting into. I’ll continue to enjoy retail. You have your Classic to hide away in, though it will never be like it was when the game launched. I’ll stop by once in a while to undercut everyone on the AH.
Hearing you bash TBC so much makes me think you are one of those WPVP cry babies who whined about the advent of flying because you didn’t have easy targets anymore unless they were on the ground afk. I’ve even read one of your earlier posts talking about how you wished that flying was kept at 60% speed so that ground mounts would be the preferred mode of travel. TBC, Wrath, and even Cata were designed with flying in mind since many places you simply couldn’t get to without it. IMO it made the game better because we finally had a way to go afk without having to hide inside a town surrounded by NPC guards so we wouldn’t get ganked. God forbid I get up to get a drink or go to the bathroom without getting killed while I’m gone. People like you are the reason we have Pathfinder now 
Not everyone who plays games stays forever. Some will come since they never got to experience Vanilla and seems nice that they are allowing this. Some BFA players played during vanilla so its seen as old content to them plus they see Retail wow as the current iteration where systems in place are arguably better where balance is a thing and new content is always being made. Classic is seen as more an art piece where you come take a look then be on your way. There will be people who visit everyday and stay but its always a personal thing. Its like not everyone plays MMORPG games some play Nintendo switch and some dont.
Funny enough, Even slowbie flying mounts were preferred for travel in BC because they could fly over obstacles while riders had to go around and contend with mobs on the ground.
Yep as soon as I got flying, I never used my ground mounts again even when it was only 60% for that reason. Being able to avoid mobs whenever I felt like it was very satisfying to me. Getting to that hard to reach mining node up on a cliff was always nice too
There will be a big fall off in population before pathfinder part 2 is even released.
Theres more blood lust now too so WPVP was not like it was either.
I’m excited as the next guy, but thinking classic will be the same is just naive. We already have people mathing out how to speed level, and we know which items are broken OP like the edgemaster gloves that are going to go for thousands of gold because you’ll literally NEVER replace it. And we know T0 dungeon sets are actually garbage, but everyone in vanilla used them.
It’s quite depressing in a lot of ways to be honest, but I’m still not surprised.
min/maxers ruin everything